Magic Hour

Not gunna lie, i had a pretty big art crush on Rory Mulligan long before i met him to talk about his work for this show. I remember first discovering his work on the J&L Books website in the special edition section. They had published a small book of his work in an edition of 10 called Freddie. You couldn’t find it anywhere, but there were enough pictures on the site to get a feel for what he was up to. But I remember thinking to myself - what exactly was he up to?

There was a strange, dark, melancholic but humorous tone to his photos. There was a quality in them that i felt reflected a certain tradition of documentary style art photography, but his voice was lyrical was uncanny in all of them. As I’ve gone to speak with photographers for this show, Rory’s name has often come up as someone who’s work has had a big influence on them - especially some of the younger ones.

Rory got his MFA at Yale, has had solo shows in the US and Japan, and his work has been featured in Blind Spot, Newspaper and MATTE Magazines to name a few. Rory is a master printer too - the go to for Latoya Ruby Frazier, Tod Papageorge, Justine Kurland and Mark Steinmetz - if those four names don’t give you any sense of a level of quality demanded in their work, I really don’t know who does. All traditional black and white hand printing, so delicate and subtle and nuanced - a fine art unto itself...

We got together at his studio in in an abandoned aerosol spray can factory in Yonkers, New York, the same town which he grew up in. That landscape of his childhood is the same one that he continues to explore in his work today….