Immersed Zine

In Conversation with Mary Riley, By Ben Matthews

(All Photos by Mary Riley)

“I feel like it has a lot to do with my whole way of starting.”

A Nikon D-2100. An early high school gift from a friend of her father, the camera served as the initial flicker igniting the now life-long creative flame that illuminates the whole of Mary Riley’s being. 

I began our conversation by asking Mary a broad, preliminary question to simply turn the engines of thought inwards, “What do you have going on within that drives you to do what you do?” Reasonably, it isn’t quite the easiest task to orate the full range of our experiences from the bluest of nights to the brightest of our dawns with no more than a moment’s notice. Mary sat for a brief moment before responding, looking past my prudent gaze and into some far-off window of thought. Her reflection affixed beyond the stained looking glass, to the vast halls of a lifetime of collected memories. With countless angles to materialize, she began her outward expression by framing the snapshots of her many former selves from their beginning.  

“I liked being with my camera more than I liked being with people who were mean to me.”

Time spent getting acquainted with the mechanizations of the camera meant time spent further away from the people she had grown used to—not friends per say but the fleeting attachments of grade school made to avoid isolation, a familiar facet of surviving spaces that don’t reflect our truest selves. This season of life devoted to the development of her craft served as another point of delivery for Mary in the process of becoming. Mary was extending herself through the lens, developing her conscious eye as a photographer.   

“I had a moment of realization that I didn’t really know who I was. And whenever I had that time alone, that’s when my interests started coming out of me that I didn’t know were there.”

Mary sold that same Nikon to a close friend shortly after graduation and began a period of around five years where she dropped photography altogether. Setting off to visit family on the west coast and eventually driving from coast to coast to find herself back around the NC/SC area just prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. The lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic found us all scrambling to find some imagined comfort and escape within our immediate conditions. The seemingly endless moments exhausted and alone led Mary back to the world of film. Indie films such as Suspiria, Buffalo 66, and In the Mood for Love  re-ignited Mary’s curiosity and prompted her to recreate scenes or movements into short clips. This re-establishment of a creative impetus marked the end of an era devoid of a camera close by.

Ben: Do you have a definition of your style?

Mary: Odd. 

A fascination with experimental photography, the implementation of lighting techniques, angles, and projections assimilated with the newfound, encouraging community Mary discovered around herself, birthing a passion for portraiture that is now a defining element of her work. 

“There’s a geometry that I use, a science I use at times with lighting. I love for things to look symmetrical or almost geometric in photos, especially with shadows. Lighting is like my itch, it’s my go to more than anything.”

Mary views the extensions of herself throughout her work, especially in portraiture, as a bridge towards developing her community. “I want people to explore themselves” / “I want people to be free to express themselves, to not be afraid.” The lessons learned through the labor exerted into undoing fear’s controlling grip was instrumental to the newfound freedom of expression that allows Mary to remove the weights of outside judgment and critique, building trust in herself and her vision.“I think reaching inside is hard, when you have the opportunity to do it: it is scary, it’s uncomfortable.”    

“I think it’s fun to meet somebody and learn about their angles and observe them. Everybody has something uniquely beautiful about them. There is no better way to shoot someone, than to shoot them as them, I want you to be you.”What follows next for Mary is the first release of Plum; a collective lookbook/magazine that she has worked on with co-collaborator Brady Koch to provide a vessel for self-expression which links their photography with their interest in fashion. Mary acknowledges the challenges for many of us who may have trouble finding the comfort to express ourselves without the constraints of our locations and  Returning to the idea of an uninviting space, Mary hopes Plum can be a place where others can find commonality and freedom to express the true intentions of the soul.