BRUNSWICK

Belgian-born photographer Robert Freson, 85, trained in Switzerland and later made his home in New York City and France. He has spent the last decade living on Bailey Island in Harpswell.

During his 60-year career in photojournalism and advertising, his pictures appeared in such magazines as LOOK, Vogue, Esquire, National Geographic Magazine as well as The London Sunday Times and the Weekend Telegraph magazines in England, Match and Marie-Claire in France, Stern in Germany, and Epoca in Italy.

He served as photographic artist Irving Penn’s assistant for 13 years and set out on his own to freelance in 1961.

Freson has pointed his lens at kings, presidents, gypsies, artists and actors. His best-selling books about the food of France and Italy are still in print and making mouths water today.

In all his years of picture-making, Freson has never had a public showing of his prints — until now. “Robert Freson: The Heyday of Photojournalism” opens Saturday at the Frontier Cafe and Gallery at Fort Andross in Brunswick. The show, featuring dozens of color and black and white prints, runs through February. The exhibit will kick off at 7 p.m. Saturday with a short documentary film about Freson. The photographer plans to be on hand to discuss his work.

On Thursday, Freson reflected on life viewed through the lens of a camera. Here are his words:

I don’t think a photographer or artist ever retires. No. They just kill you. They don’t retire you. It’s a profession like general. They just fade away. Photographers just fade away, too.

They say, “How is he?”

“He’s still working, but I don’t know what he’s doing now.”

They never say, “Oh, he died.”

This is my first public show of prints. Some of it has been published before, but I kind of like to put my children — the ones that I like that never get published — on the wall. I’ve never really had the time to get all the prints done, to get them framed and everything. And I didn’t really need it.

You know, I was not too anxious to become famous. My ambition was to be successful. If an advertising agency hired me to do a job, they knew I would come back with something publishable.

I was a safe bet, no matter what. I would always get something publishable. That’s important.

I figured out, that all together, I have about half a million slides. But, let’s be honest, there’s six or seven for every one that’s usable. I always used Kodachrome. It’s a very stable color film — especially in the ’50s.

The whole purpose of the DVD I made, the documentary about my career, as well as this show and my little speeches at colleges, is trying to find an institution — a suitable place — that could take (my collection) over.

I’m not trying to sell it. I just want someone who will be responsible to take over the best part of the collection.

I think there’s a good 10,000 images that should be salvaged. Out of that, I think there were 5,000 that were published over the years.

I remember a statement made by a very well-known photographer in France, I’m not sure who it was now. He said: A very good photographer is very happy if he has one good image per year of his life. I mean, one memorable image he can be proud of that he could hang on any wall, any place, any museum. If you live 50 years and you have 50 good images, you’re immortal, and you can die.

Did I get there? I’ll tell you after the show.