“The early work joyously refracts through the strategies and attitudes endemic to the raised-on-TV, fully mediatized late 20th century—of the so-called “Pictures Generation” of which Frailey is a part. The work then turns a corner to venture on through notably 21st-century problematics relating to photography and material culture…” from the foreword by Lucas Blalock.

From a robust public presence through the ‘90s, Stephen Frailey has since then sustained his making of pictures quietly and without much notice, deliberately. Here now, is a collection of his photographs in unexpected dialogue with one another over forty years, equal parts mirth and conceptual inquiry and moving through various themes and preoccupations.

It is notable that the work, a somewhat hybrid of collage and still life is analog, despite a resemblance and affinity for digital culture and in some instances seeming to preview advances in recent image construction. Frailey notes that “this way of working has been nimble, proven to support a variety of ideas, the agenda shifting with the passage of time. It is a methodology that has become incrementally complex, supporting a train of thought without fixed margins.”

“Plaster, not Milk” is named after an early Ed Ruscha painting of a bird diving towards a glass of milk: “Angry Because its Plaster Not Milk” and in homage to its sense of mischief, pictorial illusion and nomenclature. Frailey again: “In a gulf between seeing and naming, my work often loads the frame with familiar visual motifs divested of 'meaning' and closed conclusions, to destabilize conventional expectations of content. This contradiction of visual clarity and abstract thought, between representation and abstraction, recalls my education as a painter”

Stephen Frailey is a photographer, educator, art writer and editor. He founded Dear Dave, magazine in 2007 and remains its editor. He is the author of Looking at Photography, a collection of essays published by Damiani Editore in 2020, and writes criticism regularly for Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, and The Brooklyn Rail. He is Chair Emeritus at SVA School of Visual Arts in New York, and was Chair of the BFA Photography and Video Department from 1998 to 2018, as well as the Director of the photography program at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Lucas Blalock is a photographer whose work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, Hammer Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. Recent solo exhibitions include at the Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York; Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He is on the faculty of Bard College.

Lynne Tillman is an American novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Tillman is the author of six novels, five collections of short stories, two collections of essays, and two other non-fiction books. Her book of essays “What Would Lynne Tillman Do?” was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism in 2014. Her most recent book of essays on art and culture “Paying Attention” was published by David Zwirner Books.

Plaster, not Milk Photographs by Stephen Frailey

Foreword by Lucas Blalock and afterword by Lynne Tillman

Edited and Designed by Joseph Desler Costa

Published by Silent Face Projects Hardback 180 pages, 129 illustrations 11.5 x 9 in

Silent Face Projects is an artist run publishing collective based in Brooklyn and founded in 2014. MORE INFORMATION and press images please contact info@deardavemagazine.com