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.