Reading Raymond Carver.

Selected as Book of the Week by Laura M. André

When Mary Frey began photographing family, friends and strangers in her immediate environment in 1979, she was in a state of transition: studies finished, first teaching assignment underway, pregnant -- responsibilities, duties, worries. [She felt] the need to look for meaning in everyday life, after a childhood [under threat of] an imminent nuclear catastrophe, in an America where lifestyle magazines and television illustrated how the Brave New World should look and function.

Mary Frey has made strange pictures. Technically perfect, between snapshot and enactment, intimacy and distance. Charged banalities with children, adolescents and adults, middle class, USA, 35 years ago. No reportage, a psychogram. Stock photos that no magazine would have printed, no agency would have used for a campaign. Weird.

In the end, Raymond Carver asks, "Would I live my life over again? Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?"

And as Raymond Carver [asked] in words Mary Frey answers with her pictures: YES.