DESCRIPTION

"A beautiful meditation born out of unrequited love, willful engagements and wanderings. Freddie is an instant classic" —Deana Lawson

In his debut monograph, American photographer Rory Mulligan (born 1984) presents a body of black-and-white photographs that span more than a decade of the artist's work. Spurred on by the death of a childhood friend and unrequited first love, Mulligan turned to photography and toward 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 the search for intimacy and self-affirmation.

Co-published with Matte Editions
Edited by Rory Mulligan, Matthew Leifheit and Kate Greene
Designed by Jordan Weitzman

Hardcover with belly band / 9.25 x 6.5 in. / 160 pages / 80 duo-tone images.
Thread-sewn pamphlet / 6 x 8 in. / 16 pages / text by Rory Mulligan

REVIEWS

"A beautiful meditation born out of unrequited love, willful engagements and wanderings. Freddie is an instant classic"
- Deana Lawson

“Time. Life. Memory. Love. Death. Rory gifts us these precious moments, fragments of life suspended in silver and gelatin. A timely reminder of the wonder of photography.” -Paul Graham

“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

“A forbidden love haunts the photographs in Freddie. Rory Mulligan’s strangely hallucinatory pictures remind us that horror is most potent when conjured from a world of pure fact.” - Elle Pérez

“Freddie is a haunting, chills at first glance; stark, tender and raw. Walt Whitman meets Dennis Cooper. Rory Mulligan is roaming in the night and he may be right behind you.” - Alex Da Corte

“I have a hard time writing something simple about Rory Mulligans’s exquisite work. It’s a privilege to sit with his photographs and see the world through his eyes. I see longing, an insistence on beauty and a belief in mystery and discovery, no matter the depths or shadows. For Rory, it's all poetry.” - Katy Grannan

“In gorgeous pearlescent tones, Rory Mulligan trips us through a world of unsettled connections and an often missing sun. A journey, though, where the thread never breaks, held taut by the photographer’s unfailing control.” - Tod Papageorge

“The images in Rory Mulligan's Freddie are moving, evocative, and sharply memorable, evoking historic photography of the 1970s while simultaneously presenting a new and fresh view of the world. Tree limbs, falling bodies, contemplative figures, domestic spaces, and unexpected views of nature add up to a magisterial storytelling lens and visual experience.” - Gregory Crewdson

“Why do we gather images? For every photographer it’s different. Some are collectors, some stalkers, some cultivators. For Rory Mulligan, I think of Emily Dickinson’s  “The spreading wide my narrow Hands/ To gather Paradise”. Mulligan’s work is a private affair, an internal reach, which, like Emily’s, has repercussions in the wider world. His hunger, lust and loneliness echo in every outward reach, reminding us that photography, especially in these lustrous tones, is a way to feel the world without necessarily understanding it.” - Tim Davis

“I’ve been waiting for this important book for a long time. Simply put: there is no one else who can do what Rory Mulligan does.“
- Curran Hatleberg

“For nearly twenty years, I’ve watched Rory Mulligan make pictures that read like letters from the unseen edges of the everyday. His photographs carry a quiet charge, catching life just as it slips into strangeness. He queers the tradition of street photography not with posturing or showiness, but with tenderness, turning the ordinary into something haunted, luminous, and alive. Again and again, his work reminds me that horror is never far from beauty, and that magic lives in the margins of the mundane. To live alongside Rory’s work has been one of the great gifts of my life—a record of longing, of outsider vision, and of the courage it takes to keep seeing differently.” - Kate Greene

“In Freddie, Rory Mulligan tenderly probes the camera’s potential to mitigate loss, to untangle the psychic violence of irresolution, and even to call back the dead. Charting the interstitial distance between childhood and adulthood through the lens of regret, Mulligan’s images are a quiet revelation about love, time, and a refusal to forget.” - Alissa Bennett

“Long live Freddie!” - Jason Fulford