Magic Hour

In the past two years, Mary Frey put out two new books - Reading Raymond Carver and Real Life Dramas. The first is made up of black and white work and the other, all color. Both bodies of work are in and around 35 years old and these were Frey’s first major publications of them. It wasn’t exactly as if she was unknown until now though. In fact, almost the inverse. She’s been a cult hero in photography circles for years and a beloved teacher at Hartford’s graduate program, where she taught until 2015.

Frey earned her MFA at Yale and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Her work had been show at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and at MoMA to name a few. It was actually in the catalogue for a seminal show at MoMA called The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort where I first discovered her work. I remember her pictures had everything that I was interested in photography in them - they were banal, yet mysterious moments out of the everyday, they were graphically compelling, such great color and they had a strange open ended quality to them, especially in their unusual pairings with curious texts that accompanied them.

We got together at her studio in Longmeadow, MA to have this conversation.

- Jordan Weitzman