Ep 027: Mary Frey

A SHOT: To start, can you describe the photo that we’re going to talk about?
MARY FREY: Yes, it’s my son holding my mother, and he’s holding her probably within the last couple weeks of her death.  

When and where was this taken?
It’s sort of interesting because I saw my son a few weeks ago and told him about this photograph, that we were gonna talk about it, and he said, “Yeah, I remember that. I had to bring her upstairs because she wasn’t able to walk.” All I remember about taking the photograph — because I always have my camera around — was when he came upstairs and stood in the doorway, I knew there was a picture to be taken. Now, that being said, I just didn’t snap a picture because I’m the type of person that sets up my pictures. So I took a few photographs. I moved him around a little bit, and originally — I still remember this — she had white socks on. They just glared in the picture, so I asked her if she wouldn’t mind if I took the white socks off. She said, “No problem.” And I took the photograph.

I have to preface this with the fact that I photographed my mother for about 40 years. It was sort of interesting… One of my first “aha” moments was when I photographed her with black-and-white film and my view camera. She was making a pie, and it was Thanksgiving. I set my camera up in the kitchen. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I knew I wanted to think about family snapshots and the meaning of that, but I didn’t know. So I set up my camera. She took the pie out of the oven. She held it up to her face, and it replaced her smile. That was my “aha” moment. I said, “Aha! I need to make photographs of everyday moments, spurred on by my own memory of childhood and photographs I remember.”

This particular photograph, it was the end of her life. It was different for me. It wasn’t about fitting into a project anymore. It was just an urge I had. I titled the photograph [“My Mother, My Son.”] and I normally don’t title photographs. For my earliest project, Domestic Rituals, the black-and-white work I was talking about, they were titled with very generic titles: “Woman Holding Pie.” It was never about my mother. It was never about me. It was about an idea. And it sort of resembled documentary photography, but it wasn’t documentary. OK, that being aside, we’re talking about this photograph. This was very different. It was an urge I had when I saw my son holding my mother, and I realized he was holding my mother the way my mother held me, the way I held him, so the interconnections of all those ideas. I don’t know if I thought about that right way, but I sensed it anyway. 

I sat on this photograph for 20 years because I didn’t know where it fit. It didn’t fit anywhere. I titled it because I had to title it. And I suddenly realized, “ ‘My Mother, My Son.’ I’m talking about me.” I don’t like to talk about me. My pictures never talk about me. They’re about ideas. So this really disturbed me. 

When you see the action that’s taking place, how do you initiate that it’s gonna be a photo then?
Well, I had to preserve that moment. What’s kind of disconcerting sometimes is my family didn’t like the picture at all. A couple of my sisters couldn’t look at it. I haven’t given them my book yet, so I don’t know because it’s the inspiration for this last book I did [My Mother, My Son.]. But it’s been a number of… She passed away in 2004, so it’s been a long time. 

Did you get the sense that it was just too close?
I think they felt I stepped over the boundaries a little. They understood that my parents were willing participants in my photographs, as well as they were often times. But they felt this was a private moment that I kind of invaded. But photographs for me are different animals than the event. 

So what’s your setup for taking this photo then?
I’m trained as a photographer that first used a view camera, so I really like to organize my space. Once I knew I had to take the photograph, I moved my son and my mother around in terms of how I framed. Even though I wasn’t using a view camera, I still put my pictures together as if I was. I always did that. I used rangefinder cameras. I had a medium-format rangefinder camera so that I could see the whole frame. I wasn’t looking through the lens. I wasn’t seeing any depth of field issues or anything like that. So I just set it up, moved them around a little. There wasn’t a whole lot of space in that photograph to move. I wanted to include the bedroom. I really loved that light that’s to the left. I love everything about photographs. I love the little details. That’s sort of what has kept me as a photographer is sort of discovering things in the picture after I’ve taken the initial shot. The whole idea of the way that lamp is described, the way the light from the lamp is described, the doily on the table, the books, the cards hung up on the right side against the mirror. I’m a big fan of mirrors. I have mirrors in a lot of my pictures, so this just happened to work out nicely. 

What is an example of a decision you had to make as far as how you were organizing the space here?
Where I positioned my mother and my son, how the frame of the door sort of crops right in the middle of his head and how he’s sort of enveloped in that space. I love the fact that there are areas in the photograph where on the right side there, the mirror and the lines, and they look like little segments that move toward the main picture. And they’re framed, almost like on a stage. It’s a frame within a frame within a frame. 

How would you describe your presence behind the camera? I guess this would be a bit different than when you’d be working with people who were stand-ins for the characters that you wanted to be creating.
They’re all my cast of characters. And I sort of have a way of, I hate to say “manipulating,” but sort of manipulating them — I’ll say it — for my own purposes. But I’m always very honest with people about why I want to photograph them, and as I said, I photographed my mother for almost 40 years, so she was used to it. And even though she was very ill, she still participated in it. At one point she said to me, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you must be doing something right.” This was when she was waiting to go in to see… I was in “New Photography 2” at the Museum of Modern Art, which was way back in the ’80s. It was when they first started introducing young photographers to the world and put them in shows. It was a three-person show. It was myself and [Philip-Lorca] diCorcia and David [T.] Hanson. And my mother, who was from New York and would always go to the Museum of Modern Art when she was younger, was so excited for the fact that she was going and her daughter was going to be hanging in the museum. So even if she didn’t understand, she always appreciated and trusted me and allowed me to take pictures of her. And I took pictures of her in her bedroom, in her bathroom, you name it. Everywhere. 

Aside from just being a supportive parent, did you get the sense that she liked the photos?
I don’t know if like is the right term for it. I think she appreciated the fact that I had ideas that she didn’t quite understand, but she was willing to go along with it. It’s sort of interesting. She never really had any opinions about how to pose herself. She was always very agreeable. 

What do the details that are in this room give to an image like this? I know you’ve always talked about the way that you light images. You refer to your lighting as “democratic,” in which all of the elements of an image are considered equally and you can see everything. So considering the fact that we can pretty much see everything that’s in this room, what does that add to the photo?
It’s sort of like when you write a sentence, you have a bunch of adjectives. They’re all little adjectives that you can discover, or not discover as the case may be. Those little things that that democratic lighting… It’s so suffuse, it’s so open, and it just reveals everything, reveals more than we could ever see or understand, reveals it in a way that makes it important. I just love the fact that I can see this Snoopy card. That opens up memories for me.

I love to think about the four edges of the frame and the narrative or the fiction or the story or the truth that’s enclosed in those four edges. It’s its own truth. It’s the truth of the photograph. And that’s what delights me. That’s what’s kept me as a photographer. I had that urge to take the picture of my son holding my mother, but then when I look at the photograph, I say, “Oh, my god. I love it.” I remember now that photograph of the statue that’s pinned on the wall behind them. I love looking at the cards. I love seeing the doily on the side table. I love seeing the edge of the bed. All of that for me has meaning. Everybody brings different experience to the picture, so I don’t know what meanings these things have to you, but to me, they have certain meanings that I delight in. 

I mean, one of the things I was considering when I was writing questions was understanding wether or not this was your mother and your son, just based on your body of work, because you’ve used people who could potentially have been stand-ins for your family or relatives. When considering things like the truth or the fiction of an image, how does it affect it when it is… This image is very true to you.  
It is. And it’s like a self-portrait. I don’t like that fact. That’s why I didn’t use it in any of my work. And then when I was thinking about putting this book together, it inspired me. But I didn’t put it in the pages of the book. I put it at the end, separated from the rest of the images, because this is me. This is my signature. My mother and my son. 

One direction that you could have given with this image is for your son to make eye contact with the camera. Why did you choose not to?
I have to go back and look at the contact sheet because I probably did have him look at me. This is one of maybe seven or eight shots I took, but he had to be almost like a… He reminds me of a soldier or centurion or something. It’s like his duty, his honor and his duty, to hold his grandmother. I had my mother move her hands too. I really planned it, I remember. But as I said, this one I sat on for a while because it was so different for me, and I’m so glad now I’ve found a use for it. 

What has it been able to let you tell now?
That I thought I knew a lot about photography and my photography, and maybe photographs are smarter than me, in a lot of ways. I don’t want navel-gazing. I don’t want it to be about me, but in the end, maybe it is about me. Everything you frame is about yourself, the baggage you bring to a picture, the moments… I’m older now. I’ve lived a lot, a long time and maybe even a little longer; I don’t know. That’s what this book is about: thinking back, looking back and seeing what’s transpired in your life and looking forward and seeing there’s not a hell of a lot in front of me. But there’s still stuff in front of me, and what does that mean, and how do I make use of that?

In considering your sort of reluctance to explain away your photos that you’ve had in the past, I couldn’t help but feel the titling of this photo and then using the title of this photo as the title of the book was almost asking to explain yourself a bit more. 
I know. 

Is there anything to that?
Yes. And I don’t like that. But that being said, let me just sort of backtrack because book-making has only been in my life as a photographer for about eight years. And I went back and I looked at all of my archives, and I tried to makes sense out of them. I wanted to be truthful or stay true to the original intention of the photographs but try to understand what they meant to me now, what they could mean, what the possibilities were. Just to give you a little capsule: The first book I did, Reading Raymond Carver, was about examining the choices that one makes in life — could I be a wife, a mother. The second book, Real Life Dramas, it was sort of embracing those choices in a way. So this book now is thinking back and looking forward and looking back and thinking about it. This really is probably the last photo book I’ll do. But maybe not. It’s a trilogy almost. And this is the ending of the narrative in a way. 

Do you feel like you would have made this image differently, if it had come to you 20 or 30 years earlier? You would have probably been working in a capacity where you would have had stand-ins for this idea. 
Well, I don’t know. It never came up. It never presented itself. The way I generally operated, and I still operate, is I sort of bring myself into a situation. I’m a fly on the wall. See what happens, and then either ask people to repeat that, or if I’m lucky enough, I’ll take the picture. I have ideas too about how I want people to be set up. So of course, when my son carried my mother up, I said, “Let me take a picture. Let me take another picture. Let me take another picture,” till I got it right. 

Do you get nervous making a photo like that?
No. Not at all. What’s there to get nervous about? I’m in control of the camera. People are agreeable. If they were not agreeable, I wouldn’t do it. 

But it certainly seems like this photo sat heavily with you since making it?
Yes, but at the time I had no qualms about making the picture. It was given to me. It was there. It was a beautiful picture to make, I felt. Then trying to figure out afterward how it fit into my body of work, how I wanted it to fit into my body of work, that took a while. I’ll tell you — and I shoot digitally now — I don’t look at my digital pictures. First of all, I shoot as if it’s analog. I’ll go out for a couple hours, and I’ll shoot maybe 10 pictures. And when I come back, I don’t look at them for almost a month sometimes. I need space. I mean, look at me; it took me 40 years to show some of my black-and-white work. 

What does it give this image that her feet are bare? You’d mentioned that you’d taken her socks off. 
It was a purely visual thing. The socks were white, and they stuck out, and of course, I could see it. And the tone of the photograph is almost monochromatic. You feel the flesh, and you feel the light from the lamp. It’s kind of a yellow. And after that, everything’s sort of beige-y, brown-y. She had to be totally vulnerable. The feet had to be there. The way her hand is sort of clutching her knee. And I can remember I had her look at me too. I had different positions. But this worked the best. 

So I’m curious what… How to phrase this question…because my questions have kind of shifted now that I know the story behind this.
What did you think the story was?

I wasn’t certain that this was actually your mother and your son. I thought that the title of the photo was certainly a clue but considering your past work, I didn’t know if it was less a clue and more of a push. 
What’s interesting is people have thought the first photograph was my mother, in this book — the woman opening her jewelry box — and the second photograph of the man sleeping on the pull-out couch was my son, but in actuality, it’s my husband. But that doesn’t matter. They’re all my characters, and they’re telling a story. They’re creating a narrative, a journey, hopefully, for the reader to move through and see things. Black and white and color was important to me, that I combine the two [in the book]. I wanted the black and white to almost feel like memory and the color to jolt you back into some sort of reality, even if it’s just the reality of the photograph, which it is. 

How does it feel or what does it give you when you’re able to blend the two [understandings] in that way? You know the truth and the fictions behind these images, but this photo I would say is as true as anything you might have made.
Yeah.

And how does it feel putting that in as a storytelling element?
It’s not part of the story. That’s why I separated it out. [The book] has all of my acknowledgments and thank-yous and then, all of the sudden, the title and the photograph. So I want… Well, I don’t really care what people think. In the end, if it was me, I’d say, “Oh, so that’s what it’s about. It’s about a mother and a son. The photographer is showing her mother and her son, or his mother and his son,” and then I’d go back and look at the photographs in a very different way. Suddenly it’s about self… No, I’m not gonna say self-portrait. But it’s about your own experience, my own experience. 

You’ve teetered on the edge of saying “self-portrait” quite a few times so far.
And I don’t like self-portraits. I love other people’s self-portraits, but I’m not interested in my own. But my life is like a self… I guess it’s sort of like the story of my life. That’s all I know. And I’m using that as fodder, or as a framework. This photograph is a framework for the narrative that I’ve put together in the book. 

So you made this photo in 2004, how has that truth or meaning within this image changed since then?
It hasn’t. It’s exactly what it is. It’s a symbol of familial bonds, familial love, familial nurturing, how we live our lives. So it really hasn’t changed. I have to tell you, the date on this, it says 2016 [in the book] because the publisher got it wrong. I don’t know where he got that from. It’s 2004, and rather than re-do it or put in a little piece of paper, every time I sign the book, I’ll cross out 2016 and write 2004 and then my signature. Life is not perfect. The book’s not perfect; life’s not perfect. So I love the metaphor. 

What role does trust play in an image like this?
It’s pretty obvious they trusted the fact that they allowed me to take a photograph of a moment that I feel is very intimate and a moment when my mother was her most vulnerable. My mother always trusted me. My kids always trusted me. People I find in the street tend to trust me, once they get to know me. Trust is important in a photograph, I think. I’ve never been the one to steal a photograph or to make photographs when people aren’t looking. I’m more interested in being in control of the subjects. I hate to say that, but I want to be in control of the subjects and have them do what I want them to do or exude what I think they should exude or whatever it is. And if they say no, fine. I’ll go find someone else. There’s plenty of fish in the sea. 

You’d include this image in a series before the book called “Families, Friends and Strangers,” and I think you’d described it as working outside of a particular creative directive or not bound by an artistic statement. What did working in that way teach you?
That the world is much more interesting than anything I could ever say about it, and I should be open to all the possibilities. It sort of freed me up. In the early days, I always felt like you needed a project. You worked on a project. Done. Next one. Done. I was in academia, so I had to prove myself. You have to win grants. You have to have shows. Blah, blah, blah. Do all of that. So I did all of that. But then once I was through with the projects, I said, “What do I need this anymore?” I can just go out there and see what interests me and then try to make sense of it later on. You’re talking about my Web site. I put that there as a holding tank for all of my pictures. I worked with mostly my older work. But now I’m slowly working into the 21st century here. And I’ll try to make sense out of those too. I don’t know what I’ll do with them. Maybe make a little zine or a book. I don’t know. Now that this book is over, I don’t want to rest on my laurels, but I want to take a breather and then see what I can come up with with my other work. And I still take photographs. It’s an itch I just have to scratch all the time. Why do we do this? Why do we spend so much time? And then coming back and saying, “Aw, I got nothing,” But then you go out again. But then there’s one moment where you get one thing and you say, “Wow!”

I’ll just tell you this: During the pandemic, I was shooting with a digital camera. And during the pandemic, I just needed a change-up. So I sold my digital camera, and I got a view camera, and I started shooting 4x5 color. I just needed to be out. I needed it not to be my face behind a camera. I needed to have this interaction with the world that we were slowly losing as the pandemic started to close in on us. So I took pictures for about a year and a half. Extremely expensive. Every time I pressed the shutter I realized I was spending like $8 or $10. Then after the pandemic I said, “I’ve gotta go back to sanity again.” So I sold that camera and bought a digital camera again. I only use one camera at a time, generally one or two lenses, and that’s it. It’s like an extension of my eyes. I see things in a certain way, from a certain distance, and I tailor my equipment accordingly.

What were you exploring with the camera that you were using when you made this photo?
I had gone from black-and-white 4x5 to color medium format, so that was the way I worked for a long time. As I said, it was a rangefinder, so you looked through a window. You didn’t really look through a lens. So it allowed me to organize space and to see things, using that open flash, bounce flash so all of those things were described. Everything had importance in the frame. I’m a photographer that loves photographs. That’s why I got into photography. I never liked taking pictures. I never liked working in the darkroom. But I loved photographs. I love looking at them, thinking about them, and discovering things in them. When I knew I wanted to become a photographer was when I saw [Henri] Cartier-Bresson’s book The Decisive Moment. I said, “I want to be that. I want that. I wanna do things like that.” And then it slowly evolved from there. But it’s always been about the photograph for me. Never about the experience. Never about the people. Never about anything. 

So while it can be said that all photography concerns itself in some way with death, I would say that this photograph confronts death and dying in way that feels very unambiguous. How much of that was on your mind when you were making it?
You’re asking me to remember from a long time ago. That’s hard for me to say. I mean, I knew my mother was dying, so obviously I had considered that. But that being said, I still recall we had a conversation about [making] a picture, and I just loved how my son easily picked her up like she was a leaf, like she was just weightless almost. And she fell back into him in a very comfort… She looks comforted. She looks like a young child. That whole shift from child to adult back to child again is something I saw. I had to see it. 

What do you think we can learn about you from the choices that you’ve made here?
You can’t learn anything about me from a picture. I’m sorry. I really don’t think that. You’re asking too much of a photograph. 

Why?
Because you even talked about this photograph as not understanding that it was my mother and my son. So you bring a whole different set of experiences. Your baggage is different than my baggage than somebody else’s baggage. 

I’m gonna rephrase that then. What do you like about the fact that I can’t learn anything about you from a photograph?
I’ve accomplished something. I’ve made you interested in a photograph. It’s not about me, but it’s about you and your relationship to this photograph and the rest of the world. Photographs are so interesting. They take you to a place. They surprise you. They’re about the world, but then they’re about their own world as well. So that interior-exterior thing is really fascinating to me. And hopefully people that look at my photographs feel the same way. But it’s about everybody’s relationship to their mothers, to their sons, to their grandmothers, to their family, to their responsibilities as human beings in the world. That asks a lot of a photograph, doesn’t it? I take all that back, I think.

Interviewed on March 28, 2024.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity.)

Links:
Mary Frey
My Mother, My Son.
”New Photography 2”
Reading Raymond Carver
Real Life Dramas