Julie Blackmon

Last updated

Julie Blackmon (born 1966 in Springfield, Missouri) is a photographer who lives and works in Missouri. Blackmon's photographs are inspired by her experience of growing up in a large family, her current role as both mother and photographer, and the timelessness of family dynamics. [1] As the oldest of nine children and mother to three, Blackmon uses her own family members and household to "move beyond the documentary to explore the fantastic elements of our everyday lives." [1]

Contents

Work

Blackmon studied art at Missouri State University where she became interested in photography and the work of photographers such as Sally Mann and Diane Arbus.

Drawing extensively on her personal experiences and relationships, Blackmon adds an element of humor and fantasy to create works that touch on both the everyday and the fictitious. [2]

Mind Games, Blackmon’s first major body of work, explores childhood play through a series of black and white images. In 2004, the series won her an honorable mention in Project Competition [n 1] hosted by the Santa Fe Center for Photography and a merit award from the Society of Contemporary Photography in Kansas City, MO. [3]

Following Mind Games, Blackmon switched to color film, and created the body of work Domestic Vacations. [4] [5] Its photographs of family life appear at once disorderly and playful and at times impossible. Blackmon says that the images in her series Domestic Vacations recall the tableaux of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters, notably the chaotic familial scenes of Jan Steen. [1] Tailored environments and carefully placed props are often a feature of her work.

Blackmon’s most recent monograph of work, Homegrown, picks up where Domestic Vacations left off. Following the same formula developed in Domestic Vacations, Homegrown demonstrates a further refinement of technique in regards to composition and structure. Where the previous collection was set primarily within the confines of the home, Homegrown looks to those places outside the house that are common in one’s upbringing. The local market, beauty salon and fields behind the house are equally familiar to us and shape our childhood just as much as our homes do. It is these locales that become the backdrop for disjointed scenes; in Picnic three babies sit in a pram overlooking the layout for a picnic while not far off men are shooting birds with shotguns.[ citation needed ]

Publications

Blackmon’s photographs have appeared in Time, The New Yorker, and Oxford American . In 2008, a monograph of Blackmon's work was published as Domestic Vacations. In 2014, her second monograph, Homegrown, was published. In 2015, Homegrown won the National Silver at the Independent Publisher Book Awards. [6] Blackmon has most recently been featured in an article by the New York Times, featuring her work as well as her story of her career and her ties with her hometown of Springfield, Missouri. [7]

Notes

  1. ↑ Project Competition's web page is here Archived 2010-09-29 at the Wayback Machine .

Related Research Articles

Frank Gohlke is an American landscape photographer. He has been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Scholar Grant. His work is included in numerous permanent collections, including those of Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The term vernacular photography is used in several related senses. Each is in one way or another meant to contrast with received notions of fine-art photography. Vernacular photography is also distinct from both found photography and amateur photography. The term originated among academics and curators, but has moved into wider usage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Esther Bubley</span> American photographer

Esther Bubley was an American photographer who specialized in expressive photos of ordinary people in everyday lives. She worked for several agencies of the American government and her work also featured in several news and photographic magazines.

Laura McPhee is an American photographer known for making detailed large-format photographs of the cultural landscape. Her images raise questions about human effects on the environment and the nature of humankind's complex and contested relationship to the earth.

Lynn Davis is an American photographer known for her large-scale black-and-white photographs which are widely collected publicly and privately and are internationally exhibited.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elinor Carucci</span> Israeli-American photographer (born 1971)

Elinor Carucci is an Israeli-American photographer and educator, living in New York City, noted for her intimate porayals of her family's lives. She has published four monographs; Closer (2002), Diary of a Dancer (2005), Mother (2013) and Midlife (2019). She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Jacobson</span>

Bill Jacobson is an American photographer. He received a BFA from Brown University in 1977 and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981.

Betsy Schneider is an American photographer who lives and works in the Boston Area.

Peter Fraser is a British fine art photographer. He was shortlisted for the Citigroup Photography Prize in 2004.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rebecca Norris Webb</span> American photographer (born 1956)

Rebecca Norris Webb is an American photographer. Originally a poet, her books often combine text and images. An NEA grant recipient, she has work in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The Cleveland Museum of Art. Her photographs have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, and other magazines. She sometimes collaborates with photographer Alex Webb, her husband and creative partner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paulette Tavormina</span> American fine-art photographer (born 1949)

Paulette Tavormina is an American fine-art photographer who lives and works in Connecticut and New York City. Tavormina is best known for her series, Natura Morta, which features photographic imagery inspired by 17th century Dutch, Spanish and Italian Old Master still life painters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Janelle Lynch</span> American photographer

Janelle Lynch is an American artist who uses a large-format camera and alternative processes in the discovery of ecological, spiritual, and human connection. Combining portraits and nature imagery, Lynch’s work explores and imagines a world that centers beauty, connection, and empathy as foundational values and healing forces.

Barbara Crane was an American artist photographer born in Chicago, Illinois. Crane worked with a variety of materials including Polaroid, gelatin silver, and platinum prints among others. She was known for her experimental and innovative work that challenges the straight photograph by incorporating sequencing, layered negatives, and repeated frames. Naomi Rosenblum notes that Crane "pioneered the use of repetition to convey the mechanical character of much of contemporary life, even in its recreational aspects."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Radius Books</span>

Radius Books is a non-profit art book publishing company, with a focus on photography, fine art and monographs, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Co-publishing partners include David Zwirner Gallery, Harvard Peabody Museum Press, Temple University Press, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Contemporary Austin, and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Jocelyn Lee is an American contemporary artist and photographer currently based in Portland, Maine and Brooklyn, New York.

Melissa Ann Pinney is an American photographer best known for her closely observed studies of the social lives and emerging identities of American girls and women. Pinney's photographs have won the photographer numerous fellowships and awards, including Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, and found their way into the collections of the major museums in the US and abroad.

Barbara Bosworth is an American artist, educator, and photographer. She works primarily with a large-format, 8x10 view camera and focuses on the relationship between humans and nature. Bosworth's works have been included in magazines, journals, books and permanent collections, and shown in solo exhibits nationally and internationally. In 1985, she won a Guggenheim fellowship for her photographic work.

Joanna Piotrowska is a Polish artist based in London. She examines the human condition through performative acts and the construction of multiple ‘social landscapes’ using photography, performance and film. Family archives, self-defence manuals and psychotherapeutic methods are used as reference points as Piotrowska explores the complex roles which play out in everyday performance. Her psychologically charged photographs probe human behaviour and the dynamics of familial relations, exploring intimacy, violence, control, and self-protection. The artist reveals moments of care as well as hierarchies of power, anxieties, and imposed conventions that play out in the domestic sphere.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Odette England</span> Australian-British photographer

Odette England is an Australian-British photographer whose artwork has been exhibited internationally. She often uses family photographs in her practice.

R. J. Kern is an American artist, known for his photographs exploring identity, culture, and philosophical questions about nature and heritage through the interaction of people, animals and landscape. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Canada, China, England, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Japan and Norway, at venues including the National Portrait Gallery, London, Rourke Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art Tbilisi, and Yixian International Photography Festival among many. Kern has received awards and recognition from the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, the photography non-profit CENTER, and the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and was chosen one of PDN's "30 New and Emerging Photographers" in 2018.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Blackmon, Julie. Artist Statement (color work). Accessed on Oct. 15, 2010
  2. ↑ Nordström, Alison. “Interview with Julie Blackmon” in Domestic Vacations. (Santa Fe, N.M.: Radius Books, 2008).
  3. ↑ Greene, Kendra. "Julie Blackmon" Archived 2012-06-16 at the Wayback Machine for the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.
  4. ↑ Nordström, "Interview with Julie Blackmon"
  5. ↑ Kuntz, Melissa (October 2007). "KIDS Photography Exhibition on Display at the Bell Gallery". Brown University News. Retrieved 2008-06-04.
  6. ↑ "'Homegrown' Wins Ippy Award". Radius Books. May 7, 2015.
  7. ↑ "Springfield, Missouri, Is Their Muse". The New York Times. September 21, 2022.


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.