My Mother, My Son. takes its title from a photograph Mary Frey made in 2004, and that single image becomes the hinge for a book assembled from a much larger body of work. Published by TBW Books in 2024, the volume gathers 12 color and 21 duotone plates across 72 pages, drawing on Frey’s archive to build a sequence that deliberately unsettles the order of time. Family photographs usually promise chronology: this happened, then that. Frey’s arrangement refuses that promise, placing moments from different years and different lives into a continuous present.

The photographs settle on ordinary ground — domestic rooms, familiar gestures, the unremarkable rituals that structure a shared life. Yet the familiarity is unstable. Subjects appear at ease, and still the settings seem slightly detached from the world around them, as though the rooms belonged to recollection rather than to a fixed address. Frey works in both black and white and color, and the alternation contributes to this drift; the book reads less like a record of events than like the unfinished business of memory.

At the center of the sequence is a plain fact: a life has an ending, and what it leaves behind is carried by the people who remain. The title names two of them, a mother and a son, and the book moves between generations without treating either as the subject of a portrait. Past and future are held together in whatever present the next spread provides.

A tipped-in chromogenic print on the flexicover announces the book’s allegiances. The format — large, softbound, 12 by 10 inches — and the sequencing together evoke the family album, an object meant to commemorate and to last, though what it commemorates here is the act of remembering itself. For collectors attentive to how a photobook is built rather than merely what it depicts, Frey’s use of her own archive and TBW’s exacting production make this an instructive addition to a shelf of contemporary American photography.