Mary Frey - Real Life Dramas

‘Real Life Dramas’ is a time machine, its images transporting us 35 years into the past, transplanting our reality to an indeterminate place in the United States. Mary Frey’s hyperreal photographs capture charged banalities on large-format film, pictures of middle-class children, adolescents, and adults that together seem less of a reportage than a psychogram. She offers drama, in the sense of interpretations of human experience that are cogent and valuable on their own terms, but not the dramatic. The images are positioned somewhere between snapshot and enactment, intimacy and distance, yet nothing aspires or demands to be taken as more than it actually is.