Jill Freedman, a tough-skinned photographer who immersed herself for months at a time in the lives of street cops, firefighters, circus performers and other tribes she felt were misunderstood, died Wednesday at a care facility near her home in New York. She was 79. Nancy Schiffman-Sklar, a cousin, said the cause was complications of cancer. Lots of people dream of running away and joining the circus, but Freedman actually did it, and created a body of images that captured the ache and solitude and weirdness of the American road at the point where, as she wrote, it “sings with the sinister energy of insane clowns.” For Freedman, this energy was her muse. In seven books and numerous gallery exhibitions and journalism assignments, she specialized in finding people on the rough margins of American life, rendering
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