Mary Kocol's photography has received acclaim for its transformation of ordinary domestic and street scenes, located often in her resident Somerville, Massachusetts, into dramatic, richly colored compositions that convey an uncanny sense of both day and night. By photographing at dusk, with prolonged exposures, Kocol creates a melding of daytime and evening that transforms the mundane into the fantastic.

In addition to her medium format (6x9) work, Kocol shoots with a plastic lens toy camera, producing images in which she uses the camera's imperfections and its vagaries of focus.

Examples of her photography are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1993, Kocol was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

Kocol is also recognized as a maker of animated short films. Her first, "Is This Me?" (1994) won Best Animated Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Humboldt International Film/Video Festival, and the Utah Short Film and Video Festival. Subsequent films, "I Was My Sister's Maid of Honor" (1999) and "My Father's Story." (1999), have been screened in museums and festivals internationally, most recently at the 2000 Hiroshima Film Festival.

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