In Conversation - Gallerist Robert Mann on the Photography of Julie Blackmon
By Fotografiska New York
A live in the room conversation with Robert Mann and Grace Noh, Exhibitions Manager at Fotografiska New York.
Listen to the full conversation here.
Mike Mandel in the New Yorker
MIKE MANDEL’S SELFIES FROM THE SEVENTIES
By The New Yorker
In 1971, Mike Mandel released a book of photographs called “Myself: Timed Exposures.” Part of their loose, easy charm has to do with Mandel’s appearance: with his long dark hair and thick-framed glasses, he looks like a cartoon version of a peaceable hippie, rambling through black-and-white Southern California. Though the title prepares you for an onslaught of Mandel, only two of the images show him alone in the frame. The other thirty-seven photographs feature strangers of all types, as Mandel thrusts himself into the bustle and rush of street life, popping up among people like an imp, a groovy visitor from another planet. There he is, shirtless in corduroy cutoffs, smiling with a housewife at a supermarket meat counter, or lying flat on the floor of a library with his arms tight at his sides, students craning to observe this sudden interruption. In another photo, Mandel squeezes onto a crowded bench at an airport, his face blurry, the people on either side of him blurry too, caught mid-laugh. Some of the photos require you to search Mandel out, scan for his identifying uniform of big black glasses and lank hair, as if he were an R. Crumb version of Waldo. Then you spot him: a sliver of Mandel, peering over the heads of a gaggle of young girls at Disneyland or just barely visible in the reflection of a beauty-parlor mirror.
Click here to read the full article.
B&H PHOTOGRAPHY PODCAST with julie blackmon
”We present a fun and insightful conversation on this week’s episode of the B&H Photography Podcast, perhaps due to the Midwestern charm of photographer Julie Blackmon and the enjoyable discussion of her wonderful tableaux vivants of family life in middle America. We also welcome back to the show gallery owner Robert Mann, who is currently hosting an exhibit of Blackmon’s photographs titled Talent Show. Mann was a guest on our show, in 2018, when we spoke about the work of Australian photographer Murray Fredericks.” - B&H Photography Podcast
Listen here.
Julie Blackmon in i-D Magazine
JULIE BLACKMON'S SURREAL PHOTOS CAPTURE DAILY LIFE IN AMERICAN SUBURBS
It was in Julie Blackmon’s 30s, after she’d moved into a 100-year-old house in Springfield, Missouri, “in the middle of the country, in a city with a generic name,” that she decided to pursue photography in a real way. She discovered her new suburban home had a darkroom in the basement, which had once spawned Springfield’s first photography business. And as she tried to make the living room look like Pottery Barn — “It was all the rage to have black and white pictures of your kids lined up on a shelf behind your couch at that time,” she says — the mother of three became inspired by the humour she found in the everyday moments of domestic life.
Click here for the full article.
Julie Blackmon in the New York Times
7 THINGS TO DO THIS WEEKEND
By The New York Times
Julie Blackmon’s work might immediately resonate as the images portray family life, chaotic and messy as we now more intimately know it to be. The other shows hew toward staged pieces. Cooper & Gorfer’s studio shots put a unique spin on displacement, situating female migrants, pictured like goddesses, into vaunted scenes of utopian privilege. Moving away from photographing celebrities, Martin Schoeller turns to intimate video portraits that spotlight people we often ignore: ex-inmates, or, more precisely, those once wrongly sentenced to death. Naima Green upends the traditional notion of portraiture and who it’s meant to serve with images of the L.G.B.T.Q. community — a strategy Andy Warhol daringly employed years ago in two series that the institution has placed on its website.
Click here for the full article.
Julie Blackmon on B&H Photography Podcast
PODCAST: ALL IN THE FAMILY, WITH JULIE BLACKMON, AND A NEW NORMAL FOR PHOTO GALLERIES
By B&H Photography Podcast
We present a fun and insightful conversation on this week’s episode of the B&H Photography Podcast, perhaps due to the Midwestern charm of photographer Julie Blackmon and the enjoyable discussion of her wonderful tableaux vivants of family life in middle America. We also welcome back to the show gallery owner Robert Mann, who is currently hosting an exhibit of Blackmon’s photographs titled Talent Show. Mann was a guest on our show, in 2018, when we spoke about the work of Australian photographer Murray Fredericks.
Click here for the full podcast.
Maroesjka Lavigne Photographs for The New Yorker
How Prosperity Transformed the Falklands
By The New Yorker
It is a place to retreat to in a time of plague. Outside the town are miles and miles of empty land, and few roads. Nothing anywhere but whitegrass, dark, scrubby bushes growing close to the ground, and rocks. Only low mountains and no trees, so there’s little to block the incessant wind that blows in from the sea. It’s very quiet, at least when the wind dies down, and some people find the silence and the emptiness hard to take. Before the war, in 1982, some of the bigger farms employed dozens of men, and there were settlements with forty or fifty people living in them, but most of those people are gone now, either moved or emigrated. These days, there is one person for every twelve square miles. Some of the old houses are vacant and derelict; others were hauled out of the settlements, leaving not so much as a gravel track behind, because the people who lived there rode horses.
Click here for the full article.
The Wall Street Journal on Artists during Covid
How Artists Stayed Creative During the Lockdown
By The Wall Street Journal
Brooklyn-based artist Mary Mattingly is best known for large-scale public projects that tackle big issues, like “Swale” (2016), an industrial barge that she turned into a “floating food forest” filled with edible plants for harvesting by visitors, which addresses food insecurity and sustainability. But in the first weeks of lockdown, health issues pushed her art in another direction.
Click here for the full article.
Julie Blackmon X Billy Collins
Julie Blackmon In Conversation with Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins
By Fotografiska
Photographer Julie Blackmon and Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins share a casual conversation on the opening evening of Julie Blackmon’s exhibition Fever Dreams on March 5, 2020. The two long-time friends discuss Julie’s photographs from her Homegrown series, inspired by her childhood in Springfield, Missouri and complemented by poetry readings from Billy’s vast collection of work. Together, they discuss innocuous domestic tableaux, woven with fantasy and subtle satire, which reflect a delicate balance between the darkness and charm of contemporary American life in suburbia.
Click here for full video.
NY Times on Cig Harvey
Still Lives
By The New York Times
You have to work hard at living in Maine in late March. You have to make an effort at being happy when your day can peak with the orange light at dawn. Wear a pink scarf, cook with pomegranate seeds, paint a wall red, something to show you’re not defeated by the unrelenting winter. For the majority of the country, the start of April is glorious, spring bursting full of color and smells. But where I live, the trees are still completely bare. Everything is beige except when it snows. Our reward is the kaleidoscope of summer and fall and then, just like new mothers, we forget about early April, remembering only just how much we love Maine.
Click here to read more.