Graduate School #1 - Hartford Art School

The Hartford Art School MFA Program is a very interesting graduate school possibility for me. The majority of the course work takes place in the Summer allowing people to hold a job throughout the rest of the year.  I’m very interested in assisting professionals and learning the business side of running a photography business. The flexibility to do this, as well as expand my knowledge by interacting with other creative persons, is extremely enticing.  The program schedule includes short sessions that happen in the fall and in the spring that take place in remote locations.  I feel that meeting in new areas and trying to produce a body of work while there could be very uplifting and motivating.  Whenever I visit new locations, I am always really excited.  The idea of seeing something for the first time with a group of creative artists could lead to great work.  I also like that a-lot of the course work is geared towards producing a photo-book. This is something that has interested me for a long time.  I would love to make a book that tells a story.

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Faculty - Mary Frey
Mary Frey’s work has a very unique quality to it.  In particular I find this to be true in her latest series, “Imagining Fauna”.  This is definitely due to both her subject matter and choice of process.  Her use of dynamic range photography elevates the picture and doesn’t call attention to itself.  Mary Frey’s work uses a very old process know as wet processing where she uses E6 film to create unique wet plate images.  I was struck by the "strange, ghostly and beautiful [1]” qualities of the pictures.  Although our subject matter may be rather different, our ideas and goals have similarities. The qualities of being strange, ghostly, and beautiful are all aspects that I hoped to show in both “In our Wake” and “Artific.”

[1] Frey, Mary . "Mary Frey." Mary Frey - Photographer. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Oct. 2010. <http://www.maryfrey.com/fauna/index.htm#title>.

biography - 

Mary Frey received her MFA from Yale University in 1979 and is currently a professor of photography at the Hartford Art School.

Frey has attained 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. 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, NY, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Chicago Art Institute and the International Polaroid Collection.

Frey, Mary . "Mary Frey - bio." Mary Frey - Photographer. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Oct. 2010. <http://www.maryfrey.com/bio/index.htm>.

images -

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Graduate Work

Unfortunately with the program being very new I was unable to find a link to the graduate students' work.  In a sense this may be discouraging, as it would be nice to know what people have been producing and what they think of the program.  I may try to email them and see if they can give me any information about current students and what they have don