Julie Blackmon is an American photographer known for staged, narrative images that blend humor, suburban life, and art historical reference. Her large-scale color photographs are held in major museum collections and explore family, fantasy, and contemporary culture.

Springfield, Missouri, Is Their Muse
The New York Times

Springfield is present in the DNA of all her work. Her photos are set amid the front porches, backyards and half-deserted streets of her Midwestern town. Often elaborately constructed, the images are full of references to art history and pop culture as they capture subtly dark domestic scenes: toddlers left unsupervised near water; bulk groceries spilling out of a minivan in a Costco parking lot; two small girls posing stiffly in a driveway in matching dresses like the twins from “The Shining.” (read full article)

The National Gallery of Art acquires two images by Julie Blackmon
National Gallery of Art

Paddleboard pays homage to George Caleb Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845) by replacing the two men with a heavily pregnant young woman and a small boy, thus centering women’s labor. The cargo of the fur traders has been swapped with a tall stack of coolers. The child swimming in the background, with a shark fin strapped to their back, adds a menacing note, suggesting the struggle for survival despite the apparent tranquility of the scene. In Flatboat Blackmon has restaged Bingham’s iconic painting The Jolly Flatboatmen (1846) as a tableau of children and adolescents loafing on a raft. However, in Blackmon’s present-day reimagining the central white male figure of the painting becomes a young Black girl reveling in the joy of a summer’s day. (read full article)

Review: Julie Blackmon’s absorbing photography of everyday Midwestern life; or is it?
The Los Angeles Times

Blackmon's work abounds with tender humor but also shrewdly subtle satire. It's no coincidence, for instance, that adults are all but absent here, and many of the situations depicted are spiked with the potential for danger — an unattended fire, bubble wrap encasing a young boy's head, popcorn strewn on a blanket in front of crawling babies. Perhaps every play ends up being a morality play. The freedom these children enjoy is a vanishing American resource, and Blackmon is nostalgic for it, for its loose and sloppy beauty. She edits out nearly all signs of contemporary technology or commercial branding, ever more gently pushing these scenes into a vaguely idealized past. (read full article)

Julie Blackmon’s Dark, Irreverent Photographs About Parenthood
The Cut

I think there’s a confidence that comes from working and knowing a place that well. I mean, it doesn’t sound cool. It’s okay to be from a place like Springfield, Missouri, but it’s not okay to still be there, you know? I’m aware of that. But I kind of resist that. I don’t know — I feel like I’m really lucky to be in the same place I grew up in. You know everybody. You know their pasts, you know who lived in this house [for] 30 years, you know who lived in that house 10 years ago. I think there’s a certain amount of information that comes from staying in a place your whole life, and I don’t know that that’s appreciated, really. (read full article)

Julie Blackmon’s best photograph: family joy at a new delivery in Springfield
The Guardian

The children here are my nieces and nephews, mostly, since my own kids are too big to use now. I like using small children because their little bodies lend a particular kind of humour – and they fit into the frame better than giant Americans. I also like the lack of self-awareness they have when they’re under seven. It would be hard to do my work with actors, because sometimes it’s the things I don’t plan that make the picture – like this bubble-wrap. I didn’t know he was going to do that. (read full article)

Julie Blackmon's Missouri photos show the art that's 'right in front' of us
NPR

Given her success so far, Blackmon could have left Missouri long ago to practice her art elsewhere, but “I can’t imagine working anywhere else but Springfield,” Julie told The New York Times in September. “I grew up there and know it.”

There’s also something universal about the locale that can draw people in.

“A lot of people are from a place like Springfield, Missouri, but they're not still there — not if they're cool at all,” she told KCUR Tuesday. “I'm just doing my work, working with what I have, in my place that I love.” (read full article)