By Rachel Morton
AlumnAe feAtured in fAmous photogrAph
18
Finding Herself
REGIS TODAY
W
hile at the dentist’s office several years ago, Mary Crane Fahey ’64 was absently thumbing through a magazine when she came upon an image that made
her do a double take. The photograph by Garry Winogrand was entitled World’s Fair,
New York 1964, and it showed six young women sitting on a bench, waiting for a bus. What drew her eye was a dress. “It was blue with a Kelly green stripe down the center. She recognized that dress—“I wore that dress to death.” She also recognized the handbag—her first Etienne Aigner bag. “Oh my God, that’s me!” she thought. “That’s us!” Seated on the bench with Fahey was her Regis roommate Barbara Bye, and their classmates Louise Brennan, Karen Johnson, Audrey Dalton, and Fredda Callaghan. It was 1964, and they had just graduated from Regis and were on a whirlwind one-day trip to New York City to see the World’s Fair. “We were all exhausted,” she remembers. “It was a full day, coming from Boston to New York, doing the Fair, and going all the way back. On the bus ride home, we all conked out.”
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Fahey tore the photo from the magazine, tucked it away, and eventually lost track of it. A few years later, while visiting her daughter and son-in-law, who is a photographer, she was reading an issue of Aperture—a photography magazine—when she saw the photograph again. This time Fahey did some research and called the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, where Winogrand’s work is represented. She told them who she was. “I am not a nut,” she recalls telling the curator of the gallery, “but that photograph is of me and my Regis College classmates.”
Winogrand is widely regarded as one of the premiere “street photographers” of his time. He liked to shoot in cities, in crowds, snapping moments in time. And he liked shooting women. “I am subjective in what I photograph,” Winogrand said in a 1982 WNYC series called Creativity hosted by Bill Moyers. “Women interest me. How they look, how they move, their energy.” Many of his photographs of women were gathered in a book called Women are Beautiful—a book Fahey hopes to add to her collection one day, since this photo is among them.
10/19/12 4:10 PM