Domestic Rituals
March 15 – April 10, 1985
1979-1983
This project grew out of my fascination with the snapshot as a vessel for, and shaper of memory, and my abiding interest in the straight photograph as a seemingly truthful and precise record of an event. The work began with the systematic documentation of daily routines (cooking, eating, dressing, etc.). I sought out particularly banal situations and posed my subjects to appear as if they were truly engaged in their activities. The pictures, which have a quasi-documentary look about them, resemble a kind of tableau-vivant. The tools I chose to use–a large format camera, black and white film and diffuse flashbulb lighting–further enhance the stylized look of these images. At once, this body of work attempts to question the nature of photographic truth while using the iconography of middle class customs to comment on societal values and systems.
Mary Frey is a photographer who currently lives and works in western Massachusetts. The artist earned her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 1979 and subsequently taught photography at the Hartford Art School, retiring from the undergraduate program in the Spring of 2015.
Frey has received numerous awards for her work, most notably a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984 and two photography fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980 and 1992. She was the recipient of a Te Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and an artist’s grant from the John Anson Kittredge Fund in 2010. During the 1994-95 academic year Mary Frey was the Harnish Visiting Artist at Smith College, Northampton, MA and in the spring of 2001 she completed an artist’s residency at the Burren College of Art, County Clare, Ireland.
Her work has been exhibited extensively and is part of many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Chicago Art Institute and the International Polaroid Collection.
Much of Frey’s work addresses the nature of the documentary image in contemporary culture and most recently she has worked with 19th century photographic processes to produce ambrotypes and lithophanes. A book of her early images, titled Reading Raymond Carver, was published by Peperoni Books, in 2017 and was on the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation’s shortlist for best First Photo Book for that year. She has subsequently published two other books- Real Life Dramas with Peperoni Books in 2019 and My Mother, My Son with TBW Books in 2024.
