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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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CNN on Julie Blackmon's "Fever Dreams"

Charming, chaotic scenes of family life in small-town America blend reality with fiction

By Jacqui Palumbo

In Julie Blackmon's photographs, her quiet neighborhood in Springfield, Missouri, is transformed into a theatrical stage where children reign. They gather poolside in the balmy summer; direct talent shows in the garage; and prepare to take flight off of kitchen chairs, leaving toys and household ephemera strewn about. Adults, when they do appear, are often cropped out of frame, obscured like the unintelligible grownups of Charlie Brown's world.

The artist has lived in Springfield her entire life, calling her home city in the Ozarks region the "generic American town."

Blackmon's forthcoming show at Fotografiska, "Fever Dreams," plays on fiction and reality.

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JULIE BLACKMON FEATURED IN WHITEWALL

Photographer Julie Blackmon Takes Us Home to Missouri and Relives “Fever Dreams”

By Eliza Jordan

Today, almost 90 percent of the United States is under a government-enforced “stay at home” policy. Necessary businesses are the only ones open—like hospitals, grocery stories, and pharmacies. That unfortunately omits most art institutions, and they’ve since had to shutter their exhibitions early. One of these museums is the brand-new Fotografiska in New York, where there’s five exhibitions on view behind closed doors.

Whitewall got in touch with Fotografiska about one of those exhibitions—“Fever Dreams” by Julie Blackmon—to see it virtually. The Missouri-based artist spoke to us about her personal relationship with photography, and how it reflects the place—down to the very same Springfield neighborhood—she’s been living in all her life.

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Blind Magazine on Julie Blackmon

Julie Blackmon’s Surreal Photographs of Contemporary American Life

By Miss Rosen

When the body is fighting infection, our immune system goes to war, turning up the heat quite literally to try to stop temperature-sensitive pathogens from further ravaging us. The result is a fever, which is known to produce hallucinatory, nightmarish dreams that evoke the sensation of watching a sci-fi film, and can be recalled in minute detail, turning the familiar and mundane into something of a horror show.

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Julie Blackmon featured in A Cup of Joe

I Can’t Stop Looking at Julie Blackmon’s Photography

By Joanna Goddard

The oldest of nine children, photographer Julie Blackmon now has 100 relatives living in her Springfield, Missouri neighborhood. She photographs her nieces and nephews in beautiful but unsettling scenes — maybe a child is floating upside down in a pool or climbing too high on a rope. “It’s like, how do I explore the charm and grace of everyday life and still reveal a little bit of the dark side?” says Julie. 

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Mike Mandel discusses “Baseball Photographer Trading Cards”