• Contemporary American photographer Julie Blackmon draws inspiration from the raucous tavern scenes of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters, creating photographs...

    Contemporary American photographer Julie Blackmon draws inspiration from the raucous tavern scenes of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters, creating photographs based around the people and places in her small community. Blackmon has compared her surroundings to a giant Hollywood prop closet, where a Starbucks employee out on a smoke break may appear in her next photograph, or the beauty shop she passes every day becomes the setting for a new piece. “It’s a fun perspective to have … to see the world around you as a potential story or idea. It changes how you see things. Nora Ephron said, ‘everything is copy,’ and that has really stayed with me. I live and work in a generic town, with a generic name, in the middle of America, in the middle of nowhere… but the stories unfolding around me are endless.”

     

    Both comical and serene, Blackmon’s photographs focus on scenes often involving children, family, and friends, saturated with pathos and a fascination with the everyday. Her work serves as a mash-up of pop phenomena, consumer culture, and social satire. Leah Ollman of the LA Times recently wrote about her work – “Each frame is an absorbing, meticulously orchestrated slice of ethnographic theater… that abounds with tender humor but also shrewdly subtle satire.”

     

    Blackmon was born in 1966 in Springfield, Missouri, where she currently lives and works. She studied art at Missouri State University, where she became interested in photographers Sally Mann and Diane Arbus. Blackmon left college before finishing her degree, but turned again to photography years later as a mother of three, using her domestic experience as a focus for her early work.

  • Julie Blackmon's work has been shown in a number of exhibitions and can be found in permanent collections such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA, and The Walt Disney Corporation, among others. She's been included in exhibitions at institutions like The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, NH, Biggs Museum of American Art, Dover DE Houston Center of Photography, Houston, TX; and many more.

  • 'With or without snow (and yes it's melting), it seems like we've had 350 snow days in a row. I...
    Julie Blackmon, Snow Days, 2021

    "With or without snow (and yes it's melting), it seems like we've had 350 snow days in a row. I have so much respect for the parents who have spent months upon months nonstop with their kids underfoot. It's unnatural and next to impossible. The thing is, too much together time is hard, but too much alone time is, too. The simultaneous desire to connect and disconnect. They're such primal needs—the need to draw close and then to retreat." - Julie Blackmon

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  • “My goal is to explore and critique the way we live today, and I have been surprised and gratified to...
    Julie Blackmon, Bathers, 2019

    “My goal is to explore and critique the way we live today, and I have been surprised and gratified to find that photographs can operate in a multitude of ways: as social commentaries, as comedies of manners, as chroniclers-and defiers-of time,” - Julie Blackmon

  • 'For the last 10 years or so, I have been able to draw on everyday life around me, but tell...
    Julie Blackmon, Fake Weather, 2017

    "For the last 10 years or so, I have been able to draw on everyday life around me, but tell it in my own way. I’ve continued to be interested in creating narratives that are inspired by many sources…from the lives of my sisters and their kids, to my own upbringing, to the realities and psychological issues so many of us are now facing in our world today. The social commentary element is becoming more and more important to me. Whether it be about global warming (my 2017- piece, Fake Weather) or today with Covid, (my 2020 - piece, Bubble) I feel like there is an endless amount of subject matter (and humor even) to be found in our modern scary world." - Julie Blackmon