Signed, Mary FREY (*1948) - Real Life Dramas - 2018

Take advantage of this rare opportunity to acquire the signed copy of the very rare and highly sought-after title 'Real Life Dramas' by the prominent American photographer Mary E. FREY!

As always, Café Lehmitz Photobooks from Cologne guarantees precise and reliable descriptions, 100% transport protection, 100% transport insurance, and combined shipping – worldwide.



Background information on the out-of-print, SIGNED photobook 'Real Life Dramas' by American photographer Mary E. FREY.

About the prominent American photographer Mary FREY (*1948)
Mary E. Frey is a photographer and a professor of photography at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut. Her staged scenes of everyday middle-class life, featuring family, friends, and strangers, which at first glance seem documentary, explore the nature of the documentary image in contemporary culture.
In 1984, Mary FREY had a solo exhibition at the Hudson River Museum and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her works were featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (for example, in the influential MoMA exhibition 'Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort' from 1991, which explored suburban life and included 62 photographers, among them Mary FREY, as well as Robert ADAMS, William EGGLESTON, Lee FRIEDLANDER, Nan GOLDIN, Sally MANN, Cindy SHERMAN, and Joel STERNFELD) and are part of the collections of the museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. After earning her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in visual arts, she taught photography for 35 years at the Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford, where she worked until her retirement in 2015.

Mary Frey has published a total of five photobooks: the self-published book 'Imagining Fauna' (2014), as well as titles published by various publishers, including 'Domestic Rituals' (2014), 'Reading Raymond Carver' (2017), 'Real Life Dramas' (2018), and 'My Mother, My Son' (2024).

Translate to English. Return only the translation:

Background information

A great American photographer is being rediscovered. When Mary FREY's photo book 'Reading Raymond Carver' was published in 2017 (in a total of two editions), many people were surprised and asked: Why don't I know her? What happened that more than 30 years had to pass before these magnificent images were publicly shown? It's not quite like that. For the black-and-white images that Mary FREY photographed between 1979 and 1984 at home and in her immediate surroundings in Massachusetts, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1987 and 1991, her color photographs on the same theme were exhibited at MoMA in New York. And then? Silence.
Mary FREY continued to photograph and worked as a lecturer; a few museums and collectors have her images in their collections. Famous photographers and female photographers were inspired by her, and she has left her career behind.

But the images are too good to be overlooked. Photographed in large format on film, technically perfect, at the intersection between snapshot and staging, intimacy and distance, they depict charged everyday life with children, teenagers, and adults, middle class, USA, in the 1980s. Not reportage, a psychogram. Funny, sad, true, and hyperreal.

In the exhibition 'Real Life Dramas', opened on September 8, 2018, at the Cologne 'Forum für Fotografie', the two major works by Mary FREY in black-and-white and color were presented together for the first time in an extensive solo show.

Personal Statement of the American photographer Mary Frey

In the mid-1980s, many photographers, including myself, questioned the idea that a photograph objectively depicts reality. What significance does an image hold? How do framing, perspective, presentation, and all the other choices made by the photographer influence this significance? Can a photograph truly capture the truth? I would argue that a photograph contains its own truth—or fiction—and that is where its strength lies. Our trust in what the photograph shows reinforces this concept and lends it credibility. Thirty years ago, this idea might have been provocative or at least stimulating. But today, in the age of social media, we are confronted with a flood of banal images—selfies of situations that are obviously staged but are accepted without question today. As viewers, we are all willing to set aside our skepticism and trust the 'truth' of what we see, even though we know it is staged. My two series, 'Real Life Dramas' and 'Domestic Rituals,' have aimed precisely at this.

Translate to English. Return only the translation:

Peperoni Books Berlin, 2018. First and only edition.

Hardcover without dust jacket (as published). 235 x 295 mm. 128 pages with over 60 color photographs. Includes the three-part 'Real', 'Life', and 'Dramas' by Tim Carpenter in English.

Condition: The book is in very good, almost new condition both inside and outside. On the front endpaper by Mary FREY, signed in thin pen with full name!