Freddie by Rory Mulligan

Join us to celebrate the publication of Rory Mulligan’s debut monograph Freddie, a body of black and white photographs that spans more than a decade of the artist’s work. The artist will be in attendance to sign books (available from Picture Book) with photographs on view, and beverages will be available from Boxing Day Café.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Spurred on by the death of a childhood friend and unrequited first love, Mulligan turned to photography and towards home to unpack his personal history, relationships with other men and his own place in the canon of documentary photography.

Crystalline yet strange images of suburbia are punctuated by charged portraits and self-portraits resulting in a poetic, rhythmic rupture of traditional documentary narrative. Mulligan’s process of creating this work was deliberately paced, often stepping away from it for months or even years at a time to focus on other projects. He considers Freddie to be something beyond simply personal, it is a revelation of the artist and his navigation through loss and search for intimacy and self-affirmation.

“Rory Mulligan’s 15 yearlong photographic epic poem, Freddie, situates the specter of beautiful boys, the horror of desire, and transcendent distortions of bodily pleasure, alongside bucolic domestic life in the Hudson River Valley. He uses the vocabulary of documentary, its form and complexity, to reflect on a deeply personal story inside and through his attention to an exterior world. Individual photographs are alternately humorous and disparaging, metaphoric and miraculous, exhilarating and revelatory, or beautifully banal. Rory is simply one of the best photographers of all time.”—Justine Kurland