DOMESTIC
VACATIONS
Julie Blackmon
Hardbound,
11" x 11", 96
pages
40 color illustrations
2008, Radius Books
Essay by Regina Hackett
Interview by Alison Nordstrom
From the Publisher:
The Dutch saying, “a Jan Steen household,”
originated in the seventeenth century and has come 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, are the direct inspiration behind
the layered domestic scenes of Julie Blackmon’s photographic
work. Raised as the oldest of nine children, and the mother of
three herself, Blackmon takes an approach to her work that is
at once autobiographical and fictional. According to Anne Wilkes
Tucker of The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Blackmon has “taken
a subject that is ripe for cliché—mother photographing
children— and through the subtle, digital manipulations,
the use of color and highly graphic images, she’s given
it humor and edge and taken the subject somewhere fresh.
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