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Julie Blackmon
Julie Blackmon
Julie Blackmon

Julie Blackmon

Country: United States
Birth: 1966

Born in Springfield, Missouri, Julie Blackmon studied art education and photography at Missouri State University. She has received several national awards for her photographs, including commendation in the 2004 Santa Fe Center of Photography Project Competition, a merit award from the Society of Contemporary Photography, 2005 B& W Magazine Merit Award for Single Image Contest, 2006 1st Place for Domestic Vacations from the Santa Fe Center of Photograph Project Competition, 2006 Critical Mass Book Award Winner for Domestic Vacations, and recognized as American Photo’s Emerging Photographer of 2008. Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Toledo Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, among numerous others.

About Domestic Vacations:The Dutch proverb “a Jan Steen household” originated in the 17th century and is used today to refer to a home in disarray, full of rowdy children and boisterous family gatherings. The paintings of Steen, along with those of other Dutch and Flemish genre painters, helped inspire this body of work. I am the oldest of nine children and now the mother of three. As Steen’s personal narratives of family life depicted nearly 400 yrs. ago, the conflation of art and life is an area I have explored in photographing the everyday life of my family and the lives of my sisters and their families at home. These images are both fictional and auto-biographical, and reflect not only our lives today and as children growing up in a large family, but also move beyond the documentary to explore the fantastic elements of our everyday lives, both imagined and real. The stress, the chaos, and the need to simultaneously escape and connect are issue that I investigate in this body of work. We live in a culture where we are both “child centered” and “self-obsessed.” The struggle between living in the moment versus escaping to another reality is intense since these two opposites strive to dominate. Caught in the swirl of soccer practices, play dates, work, and trying to find our way in our “make-over” culture, we must still create the space to find ourselves. The expectations of family life have never been more at odds with each other. These issues, as well as the relationship between the domestic landscape of the past and present, are issues I have explored in these photographs. I believe there are moments that can be found throughout any given day that bring sanctuary. It is in finding these moments amidst the stress of the everyday that my life as a mother parallels my work as an artist, and where the dynamics of family life throughout time seem remarkably unchanged. As an artist and as a mother, I believe life’s most poignant moments come from the ability to fuse fantasy and reality: to see the mythic amidst the chaos.
 

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More Great Photographers To Discover

Qingjun Huang
China
1971
A freelancer artist, photographer. He was born in 1971 in China. He has been engaged in photographic art creation for 30 years, currently lives and works in Peoria, IL USA. Qingjun's representative work is series from 2003 and it is still on-going. The series has reached 150 works till 2023. Robert Frank reviewed Qingjun’s works in 2012 and evaluated “ Your work is an open window to look at China. 'Family Stuff' contains the main series and some sub-series includes 'Online Shopping Family Stuff', 'Homeless People’s Family Stuff', 'China Intangible Cultural Heritage Inheritor’s Belongings', 'The Stuffs of Live Streamers', and 'Family Stuff USA'. BBC interviewed Qingjun four times, Various international media, such as New York Times, Bloomberg, Harvard Business Review and Wired, have also covered his works. His works have also been published widely on paper media, online media, photo books such as National Geographic, Architecture Boston, Business Insider, GEO, Chinese National Geography, Discovery Cultural Geographic Monthly, Guardian Weekend, China Daily, Chinese Photography Magazine, Grazia France, Dutch Weekly Magazine, Vrij Nederland, Dutch Financial Daily, Family Photography Now etc. Some of his works appeared in textbooks published by Oxford University Press, and National Geographic learning. Family Stuff I have been making my long-term project "Family Stuff" series for 20 years, which now includes 150 photographs. I gather a family’s belongings from different spaces in the home and arrange them in one place to take a photograph with the family members. Most of these photos are taken outdoors, with the home as the background. Ninety percent of my previous works were shot in China during a time of rapid economic development, modernization and globalization. I used this method of staged photographs to record history. In the photos, a household’s real interior space is briefly exposed in an external space; also can be seen are environment changes, urban expansion, technological advancements and shifts in people's lifestyles. Through static documentation of the above, I create a dynamic social panorama. From 2022, I started photographing American families. The family is the smallest unit that forms society, and many such units make up this society. I continue to use the "Family Stuff" series to reflect the internal structure and diversity of contemporary American society. I have observed that among American families, whether they live in big cities or small townships, there isn't much difference in their basic material living standards. Therefore, I pay more attention to showcasing their cultural and spiritual life. I spend a significant amount of time preparing for each photo, getting to know the story of the subjects, visiting their rooms, contemplating the concept of the shoot, and carefully selecting the items for display. The concepts of these works cover the lifestyle of native-born Americans, immigrants' nostalgia for their homeland, as well as themes of love, work, identity, gender and the passage of time. Each material object is carefully chosen to reflect the subject’s interests and aspirations. I move these items and arrange them in overlapping frames, visually enhancing the familiar scenes and highlighting the current life status, beliefs and emotional memories of the family or individual. In Oct.2023, I had photographed a Swiss man living in a camp, with his Harley motorbike and sports car living a different lifestyle in Switzerland, which makes me thinking about to document different lifestyles around the world as much as I can. I then came back to China and photographed two more interesting subjects in December 2023. I hope to move on to showing people’s spiritual life through their material life. Through a single photograph, I depict both the external reality and their inner world. The images help viewers to look at humanity itself, understand the stories and often provoke contemplation.
Harry Gruyaert
Belgium
1941
Originally dreaming of becoming a film director, Harry Gruyaert studied at the School of Film and Photography in Brussels from 1959 to 1962. Shortly after he left Belgium at the age of 21, fleeing the strict catholic environment in which he was raised. Gruyaert travelled extensively across Europe, North Africa, Asia and the United States and lived in cities with a vibrant film and photography scene like Paris and London. During his first trip to New York in 1968, he discovered Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg. This encounter made him appreciate the creative potential of colour and encouraged him to search for beauty in everyday elements for the rest of his career. Around the same time Gruyaert befriended the American artists Richard Nonas and Gordon Matta-Clark and photographed their work. Further inspired by the visual impulses on his first trip to Morocco in 1969, he decided in the second half of the 1970s as one of the first photographers in Europe to commit himself entirely to colour photography. Gruyaert's cinematographic background instilled in him an aesthetic conception of photography. Rather than telling stories or documenting the world through his lens, he searches for beauty in everyday elements. His images are simply snapshots of magical moments in which different visual elements, primarily colour, form, light and movement, spontaneously come together in front of his lens. In his search for strong graphical images, Gruyaert focuses his camera on objects as much as on people, who are often reduced to silhouettes or rendered to plain colour fields. Unsurprisingly the countries he photographs are mostly identified by means of the subtle differences in colour palette and light, inherent to the local atmosphere, culture and climate, more than by the depicted subjects or scenes. Among his most well-known series are 'Rivages/Edges', featuring coastal views from around the world, that Gruyaert photographed out of a fascination for the rapidly changing light in these places. In the early 1970s, while he was living in London, Gruyaert worked on a series of colour television screen shots later to become the 'TV Shots' and now part of the Centre Pompidou collection. Around that time he regularly returned to his home country Belgium. This resulted in the series 'Roots', that perfectly reflects the Belgian Zeitgeist of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1982 Gruyaert joined Magnum Photos. More about Irish Summers More about Between Worlds
Ian McFarlane
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1970
Stefano Azario
Born in Paris, July 31 1966, Stefano Azario is a photographer and director now living between Milan and New York. Stefano began taking photographs at the age of 11 in 1977, shortly after the loss of his father. His family moved from Italy to London in 1979, where he studied photography at the London College of Printing from 1984 to 1987. Having developed a reputation as one of the best-known commercial photographers of children and babies, Stefano is currently concentrating more in documentary and fine art photography. A turning point in Stefano's career came in 1992 when Vogue Bambini began commissioning him regularly until the magazine's demise in 2018. In 2013, Stefano was asked to plan and photograph an entire issue of the magazine. In 1994, Stefano started shooting Gap Kids and BabyGap global advertising campaigns and continued uninterrupted for over 25 years. Major publications, advertising agencies, and globally known brands have worked with him. Benetton, Uniqlo, and Armani are just a few of the brands he has collaborated with. In his photography, Stefano tries above all to lead from the heart. With the likes of Dorothea Lange, Irving Penn and Luigi Ghirri as inspiration, Stefano is nimble in his working ways; at home directing on large video sets or shooting solo. Whether accessing his intimate and tender vision of children and babies or shooting in the Indonesian forest, he enjoys using a whole gamut of different cameras, films and technology, constantly challenging his way of seeing. His last exhibition "In Cerca Della Retta Via" at the No Gallery in Pontremoli, was put together with the patronage of the Italian Ministry of Culture as part of the Lunigiana Land Art festival in 2022. Statement Through the viewfinder I aim to capture fleeting, heartfelt moments that tell compelling human stories. I seek to make order of the world around me, to share an intuitive perspective, in the hope that my images can evoke emotions and memories, connecting viewer and subject. Throughout my career I have been drawn to projects that explore themes of childhood and relationships, seeking to convey experiences that shape us in these formative years. More recently I have roamed other areas from landscape to portraiture to expand and challenge my photographic practice and storytelling ability. In Search of a Path
Melvin Sokolsky
United States
1933 | † 2022
Melvin Sokolsky is an American photographer and film director. Born in New York City in 1933, Sokolsky was raised on the Lower East Side. He had no formal training in photography, but started to use his father's box camera at about the age of ten. Always analytical, he started to realize the role that emulsion played as he compared his own photographs with those his father had kept in albums through the years. "I could never make my photographs of Butch the dog look like the pearly finish of my father's prints, and it was then that I realized the importance of the emulsion of the day." Around 1954, Sokolsky met Robert Denning, who at the time worked with photographer Edgar de Evia, at an East Side gym. "I discovered that Edgar was paid $4000 for a Jell-O ad, and the idea of escaping from my tenement dwelling became an incredible dream and inspiration." Whether floating models down the Seine in a bubble, or shrinking his subjects, Alice-like, to miniature heights, Melvin Sokolsky helped to pioneer illusory fashion photography long before the age of digital enhancement took hold. Though he is best known for his editorial fashion photographs for publications such as Harper's Bazaar (for which he produced, in 1963, the Bubble series of photographs depicting fashion models “floating” in giant clear plastic bubbles suspended in midair above the River Seine in Paris), Vogue, and The New York Times, Sokolsky’s work is not limited to that field. Three quarters of his print photography has been for advertising, which does not usually carry a byline. As Sokolsky said in an interview: “I resented the attitude that ‘This is editorial and this is advertising. I always felt, why dilute it? Why not always go for the full shot?” Toward the end of the 1960s, Sokolsky worked as both commercial director and cameraman. He did not, however, abandon the world of print photography; in 1972 he was asked to photograph the entire editorial content of McCall's Magazine, a first for any photographer.Source: Wikipedia Melvin Sokolsky was born and raised in New York City where he started his distinguished career as a stills photographer. At the age of twenty-one he was invited to join the staff of Harper's Bazaar. Within the next few years he worked as a major contributor to four prestigious magazines: Esquire, McCall's, Newsweek, and Show. His photographs of internationally famous personalities have appeared in many of the major museums and magazines worldwide. In 1962, Sokolsky photographed the entire editorial content of McCall's Magazine, a first in its time. He is best known of his infusion of surrealism in his fashion photography, with his iconic series of women encased in plastic bubbles, floating around various cityscapes. In 1964, Sokolsky was invited by the School of Visual Arts in New York to teach a special class at his studio in New York. In 1969, Sokolsky embarked on a new career in television commercials as director/cameraman. Sokolsky has been honored with twenty-five Clio Awards, and is the recipient of every major television commercial award including the coveted "Directors Guild" nomination. Many of Sokolsky's commercials are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1972, Sokolsky versed in all phases of special effects and cinematography, presented a computerized zoom lens that he designed to the Academy of Arts and Sciences. The system was subsequently nominated for an Academy Award. 1975, Sokolsky was invited by the Japanese Graphic Society to lecture in Tokyo and Kyoto, and was subsequently named Honorary Professor of Photography. In 1986, the Victoria and Albert Museum installed an exhibition of photographs called Shots of Style, a retrospective of the worlds major fashion photographers. The Victoria & Albert included Sokolsky's photographs in the exhibit, and subsequently placed many of them in their permanent collection. In 1991, the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted a show called Appearances, that is slated to travel around the world. Source: www.sokolsky.com
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