Julie Blackmon, born in 1966 in Springfield, Missouri, is a celebrated photographer whose work addresses the intersection of everyday life and broader social issues. Known for her meticulously staged, richly detailed images, Blackmon draws inspiration from her personal experiences and surroundings, creating photographs that blend humor, nostalgia, and subtle social critique. While her work often incorporates family and domestic scenes, it extends to larger societal themes such as gender roles, the pressures of modern life, and the expectations placed on women. Influenced by art historical references and photographers like Helen Levitt and Sally Mann, Blackmon’s photographs evoke a sense of theatricality, appearing as whimsical yet layered narratives.

A major milestone in Blackmon’s career was the acquisition of her works Flatboat and Paddleboard (2022) by the National Gallery of Art. Flatboat reimagines George Caleb Bingham’s The Jolly Flatboatmen, replacing the central figure with a joyful young Black girl, offering a fresh perspective on inclusion and diversity.

In Paddleboard, Blackmon replaces Bingham’s fur trader with a pregnant woman, making a profound statement about the overlooked heroes of American history—those who were selfless rather than individualistic. This shift highlights the struggles and resilience of women, particularly in balancing the demands of career and family life. The photograph parallels the marginalized position of the fur trader, who, like many women today, must navigate a world where their contributions are often undervalued.

Blackmon’s work has been widely exhibited and collected, resonating with audiences for its intricate balance of everyday life and social commentary. Her distinctive visual style and thoughtful reimaginings offer new insights into the roles and challenges faced by individuals in today’s society.

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland, OH; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Musée Français de la Photographie, Bièvres, France; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle, WA; Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, IA; University of Arkansas, Little Rock, AR; The West Collection, Oaks, PA; and The Walt Disney Corporation, among others.

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Leah Ollman (LA Times Art Critic) foreward to Blackmon's book Midwest Materials

Stamped across the walls of a commercial building in this volume's titular photograph are the words Midwest Materials, functioning as both external signage and wry internal caption. The words identify what Julie Blackmon works with: place and props; the center of the country, the people and stuff found there. Based in Springfield, Missouri, and part of a large extended family there, Blackmon has used home and the rituals that unfold in backyards, attics, and garages as the raw material for her images for more than fifteen years. Each frame in her ongoing epic is an absorbing, meticulously orchestrated slice of ethnographic theater starring a tribe of scuffed and shirtless nieces, nephews, neighbors, and friends.

If the enjoyment of theater requires us to suspend disbelief, to temporarily accept as true the artifice we're presented, the fullest appreciation of photography asks of us the opposite: to suspend our reflexive belief, to accept (and further, to embrace) as artifice what appears to be truth. Since Blackmon practices photography as theater, she traffics in the seductive illusions and entrancing deceptions of both mediums. Hers is an elaborate and sophisticated act of make- believe. An act of serious mischief. Also, perhaps, an act of frustrated faith, an act of longing.

Her compressed, constructed universe opens out toward us, a stage set with resonant details and choice clues. What Blackmon leaves out of her pictures is just as revealing. We never see these kids doing homework or sulking through their chores. All the time in these scenes is discretionary time, filled with languorous play and innocent indiscretions. Adults are all but absent, no matter that danger lurks in the combination of children and deep bodies of water, or that bubble wrap might preclude breathing when it encases a small head. Grownups feel extraneous, and, when they do show up, they appear blithe or even subtly cruel. Witness the woman in the veterinary office sheathed neck to ankle in animal fur. Kids here are the keepers of their own kingdom, not the kept. The freedom they enjoy is a vanishing American resource, and Blackmon is nostalgic for it, for its loose and sloppy beauty.

Also missing from this world is contemporary technology. These young people play with balls, sticks, wheels, and each other. They don't suffer the chronic head-tilt toward hand-held screens. This vaguely idealized realm might resemble childhood as we knew it, but it rubs up against parenthood as we actually live it, generating friction that tickles and stings.

In striving to explain ourselves to ourselves, Blackmon deftly distorts the mirror to deliver a more incisive reflection. She works in the same vein as Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson - and before them, Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Gustave Rejlander - in creating vivid, persuasive photographic fictions. She unabashedly plunders the image pools of popular culture and art history, recasting iconic scenes using the Midwest Materials around her. The masked kids posing on front steps echo those captured a half-century ago by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The nearly naked toddler pressed against a front window is the youthful, unkempt version of Robert Adams's classically framed woman in suburban Colorado Springs. Poses and postures snipped from the paintings of Balthus crop up throughout.

The artist Blackmon most commonly cites as a chief influence, however, is Jan Steen, the seventeenth-century Dutch painter whose witty and spirited moralistic tableaux, set in taverns and kitchens, often depict people misbehaving. His panels were noted for their rigorous organization and high finish, qualities that apply equally well to Blackmon's own crisp choreography, the ordered disorder she contrives in the service of satire and social commentary. Front lawns might be cluttered in her photographs, but the domestic mess is a stand-in for muck on a larger, societal scale,

Consider the garage in the picture Trapped. Blackmon doesn't only mean the cat stuck on a bench inside. This musty capsule doubles as emblem of a psyche darkened and anguished by the Trump era. The round garage door windows are as portholes, inscribed with an SOS of despair. There's an old baby carriage inside, a sled, a lawnmower, but Blackmon has also stocked the site with survival tools: a flotation ring, a life jacket, a protest sign. And she has given us, on a pile of old magazines, another internal caption, at once summation and reconciled sigh: LIFE.

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Julie Blackmon in Conversation wtih Reese Witherspoon

REESE WITHERSPOON: As you know I am a huge fan and a collector of your work. I first found your work through a friend who showed me Power of Now and I was immediately intrigued. I love the way you comment on modern parenting. Frequently parents are distracted or not even present. When did you find this theme in your work?

JULIE BLACKMON: It's funny that The Power of Now is the first piece you know of mine. It was selected by Oprah magazine for their "Live Your Best Life" feature a few years ago. I was so excited. But then they called me a few weeks later to tell me they changed their minds. They were afraid their readers would be uncomfortable with how close the baby was to the edge of the pool. First they asked if I could move her back. I said no... and tried to explain I was being ironic-that the baby was there simply to suggest that this mom got so into her book about "living in the moment," that she forgot all about her baby. I don't think they got it. I was just trying to create tension. But that's obviously not what they were after. I don't know when, exactly, that I started playing around with this theme. It just sort of worked its way in a few years back.

RW: Wow, that's great. I wanted to talk to you about Fire, which is one of my absolute favorites. It just looks magical, like an oil painting. You can't believe the light that's on the little girls' faces and on the baby in the stroller. Is it all lit by that fire or do you have other lighting?

JB: Well, I had a couple of supplemental light sources. But to tell you the truth, it was a total experiment. I didn't plan on this working out at all. The kids were over at my house that night, and I had always wanted to try something with the figures being underlit, as opposed to how I typically light them.

But I was so busy trying to test my light, I wasn't directing them. Aside from telling them to stand there for a bit, this is just what they happened to be doing.

RW; But you get great separation and composition, especially with that kid sort of on the outside of the right edge of the border.

JB: There must be a similar kind of experience in film... where there are surprises that happen along the way.

RW: Yeah, but it takes a really good eye to find that stuff. I'm so fascinated. What's this thing over here that looks like a giant apple?

JB: I know, or like a giant melon, doesn't it? I'm embarrassed to say that it's actually some deflated ball that had been out there under the bushes for about three months.

RW: That's amazing.

JB: Everybody thinks I'm out in some remote area. It's just in the backyard.

RW: Yeah, it looks like a different kind of landscape.

JB: I know. I got lucky. Everything in this one just kind of happened, like little Margot putting her finger in her mouth and...

RW: Yeah, and that baby in the stroller. I definitely think there are moments I just feel like you've caught lightning in a bottle. Some of your stuff is very composed and then some of it I feel has a sort of media quality, as if the next frame would be completely not as aesthetically pleasing. This is one of them. I find that so natural, like a little moment in time that just happened and I can't believe you got there and got your lens in front of it.

Then, I look at something more stylized, like Girl Across the Street. It's gorgeous, and one of my favorites.

JB: Thanks.

RW: I call him Mr. Kravitz. You know Mrs. Kravitz was the nosy neighbor. He's totally Mister. He's looking at the girl across the street. I love it.

JB: Ha! Of course I remember Mrs. Kravitz! From Bewitched. So funny!

RW: I find your work very humorous: the distracted parents, the propensity for kids to find the most dangerous element in any given environment. What makes you laugh?

JB: My mom said that when I was little I used to laugh out loud reading my Pippi Longstocking books. And I've always thought those old Charlie Chaplin films were hilarious. But maybe everyone does. There's one in which he's roller skating near this ledge (with no railing) that's under construction in a toy store, and he's completely oblivious to how close he goes to the edge each time. What makes it funny is, you know, he's dangerously close and he doesn't have a clue. He's so delighted by his own skating talent he never notices. I love reading David Sedaris, too, especially the stories of his childhood. I think there was one in which the mom locked her kids outside on a snow day, yelling, "Get the hell out of my house!" Or another where she gave away her own kids' Halloween candy (to the neighbor kids who showed up late). Maybe we were of the same generation, because that was my mom (except she would not have said "hell").

Nowadays, you're expected to be this helicopter type of parent, meeting your child's every need, with patience and without raising your voice. It's not how I grew up, so I guess I'm a little resistant to these cultural shifts. But in my work, that's a place where I find humor. It charms me in a way,

RW: So many of your adult subjects seem to be looking for knowledge almost like they are reaching for something or wishing for an escape. Do you read self-help or parenting books?

JB: I tried to read The Power of Now. That's how it got used as a prop. I happened to have it laying around. And, wow, it's powerful stuff. I actually didn't get very far. I kept thinking about how maybe this "living in the moment" trend isn't always a good thing. Like maybe the key to peace (at least when things are hard)... is taking yourself out of the moment. Except of course when your kids are in danger!

RW: You have lots of kids in your images. It looks like wrangling cats. Sometimes you even work with cats! How do you achieve the images you want with uncontrollable subjects?

JB: Those kittens were tough. They'd just learned to run, and I put my six-year-old niece, Goldie, and her friend in charge of grabbing them up after they climbed out of the "Free Box," and ran across the driveway. It was all working perfectly. I'd say, "Okay, guys, grab the kitties, put them back in the box, and then run away!" We did it over and over. But then we noticed about half way into the shoot that one was missing. So we all stopped what we were doing and walked around frantically saying, "Here kitty, kitty," in our high voices. Luckily we found it in the back of the garage.

The kids can be uncontrollable, too, but mostly they want more than anything to help you. (Of course, prizes for everyone at the end doesn't hurt!) My sister told me that she was getting my niece, Margot, (who's two) out of her crib after her nap the other day, and in her sleepy voice with her eyes still half shut she was jabbering about her outfit, and the words "Julie" and "photo shoot," almost like she was worried she'd overslept. She's the little girl in Thin Mints pushing the stroller.

RW: How many of your works feature your sisters or brothers or nieces or nephews?

JB: It's kind of like whoever happens to be around. I mean I'm drawing on my family, but it's because my family happens to be handy, both as subject matter and thematically. I'll call and say "Can you be over here in 10 minutes? And then we'll all go out for pizza afterwards." I could never get anybody else to be so accommodating.

RW: What comes first? The idea, or the landscape, or the subjects?

JB: It's any number of things. It must be similar to your reading of scripts. Sometimes, it's as simple as having the perfect setting... and knowing that in that particular backdrop, almost anything you do will work. With Stock Tank, we'd gone out to my Aunt Polly's house for a picnic. She lives on this hilltop in Ozark, Missouri and has a huge stock tank. She painted the bottom of it blue to make it seem like a real swimming pool. And It occurred to me (after getting up on a ladder to shoot it on my iphone) that if you were looking down at it from above, then the worn-out wet blacktop of her driveway surrounding this glowing blue circle of water almost looked like a planet in the solar system. Even the white gravel showing through the worn, wet asphalt sort of sparkled like stars.

RW: We were just talking about directing children and how difficult that is. All the kids but one are submerged, but then one of them is floating face-up. How many images did you have to take before you got that one?

JB: A lot. I never remember exactly how many. Do you remember how many takes that you did of something?

RW: No.

JB: You can remember certain things... that it was 102 degrees that day, and how dizzy I felt by the end of the shoot.

RW: Oh my God!

JB: Even with all that, I remember thinking when I saw little Ralphie with his cheeks blown out, "Okay, I may have something." Then, I had them do different things. Like, "Everybody go in a circle. Okay, now, everybody go under." They loved every minute of it, and it was fun.

RW: So awesome. Now this one, Queen. This is just fantastic and so composed and interesting. Is there an inspiration for this?

JB: Well, yes, it's based on a very famous painting by Velázquez. I'm not even going to try to pronounce the name... well, I'll try... Las Meninas, Birdie, my niece, is the little girl in this image. This is what she wore for Halloween. That night, at the little parade we have in our neighborhood, before the kids go off to trick or treat, it seemed that Birdie knew how to act exactly as she was dressed... like this royal bitch, in a regal kind of way. She didn't smile. She didn't look around. She stayed "in character" the entire night. My first thought was that she looked right out of a Velázquez painting and I had to capture this. And then at the place where I shot the photo a week or so later, the owners just happened to have these elegant dogs that kept running through the frame. So I just went with it.

RW: Wow. It's beautiful.

JB: There's something about my niece, Birdie. She's in a lot of these, and I swear I can just think the thought, "Birdie, I need you to do this,"... and somehow she does it.

RW: Really? So she sort of transforms... with direction?

JB: With just a little bit. She's just kind of intuitive and knows. She's always been that way. I have a friend who said, "That little niece of yours, Birdie, God, she intimidates the hell out of me." And that's when she was only two! She'd look you up and down and you just knew she was sizing you up... and not impressed at all.

RW: Isn't it funny how certain kids come into this world with such presence?

JB: Yes!

RW: Wow, that's incredible. So, when I look at work like Patio, I think that the environment where you shoot is really important. And this is a somewhat different environment than I've seen in any of your other work, this mid-century, modern-looking house.

JB: Yeah, I know this one seems different. This house is tucked in among these much older homes in my neighborhood. It caught my eye one day when I was on a walk. And when I saw it, I was completely fascinated because it was so unique. I knocked on the guy's door and he was more than happy to let me shoot there. So I did. It's one of the great things about living in a small town.

RW: That's amazing. Well, the thing is my girlfriend has this in her house too so I've stared at it quite a while.

JB: Really?

RW: Yeah. And I feel like I don't see you.

JB: You mean you don't see me or my reflection in the work? I know. A few people have noticed that. Where am I?

RW: I don't see you. You're somewhere. That girl is somewhere. You know, when I am on set I'm always so aware of where the cameras are, but I'm not aware of where your camera is with your work.

JB: Yeah, only a few people pick that up. Only the most astute minds! And, yes, this is an issue in both film and photography. Which reminds me of a talk I heard yesterday with Jeff Wall. Do you know who he is?

RW: Yes.

JB: He started this whole movement in photography of borrowing from cinema to create photographs. He was talking about this process with the film editor of Nebraska...

RW: Kevin Tent.

JB: Yes. Kevin was pointing out the similarities between the two mediums, but Jeff kept pointing out the differences. One of them being that in film, people go into a theater with no expectation of accuracy or documentary truth. They want to be entertained. They want to be taken away. But it's still hard to distance yourself from that accuracy or truth in photography.

RW: And yet, where's the truth?

JB: And also, in film, you always have a script. And the film is driven by that script. In photography, there is no script. The script is written by the viewer... because you only have the moment that happened before and the moment that happened after. So, whoever is viewing it has to fill in the blanks and they write the narrative.

RW: I think that's also what is beautiful about your work. It's so evocative of my own history that I was immediately pulled in. But in another way, it presents a narrative that is a blend of old and new. It's a contemporary parenting style, but in an almost vintage world, which is interesting.

JB: Well, I think about those themes a lot in terms of--for example, there's my piece with the Girl Scout Cookies (Thin Mints). Can you believe we're still selling Girl Scout Cookies? I mean, that's kind of amazing. They've been around forever.

RW: It's incredible.

JB: But, of course, what's changed is that you can't send your kids out with a wagon on the streets anymore.

RW: Even in your neighborhood?

JB: Even in my neighborhood. Anymore than you can throw your kid up in the air 10 feet. So, I love comparing those styles of parenting to what was so much the norm at one time, to what's changed, and how those things we used to do seem so outrageous now. The freedom we had growing up versus today. You want your child to have that... but it's a different world.

I like to approach this work in a light and humorous way. Sometimes, though, there's some kind of undercurrent of difficult things that I'm thinking about or sorting out. That week before I shot Thin Mints, was when one of the most horrific crimes in the country happened right in our neighborhood. A beautiful 9-year-old girl was kidnapped and then raped and murdered just a few blocks away from where we live. And it was completely random.

It could've been any of our kids.

RW: Oh, no.

JB: Yeah, I know. It was too shocking and gruesome for anybody to comprehend. Beyond tragic. And how do you go back to the life you were living after that? Where your kids are riding bikes up and down the sidewalk in this happy neighborhood. You know it will never be the same, and that you will forevermore be plagued with a sense of danger every time your child goes outside without you. So sometimes it's these kinds of things that I'm thinking about when I make this work.

RW: I think it's interesting too-and we touched a little bit on it before-that your work has a perspective of parenting that is not black and white. The thing I relate to about it is this questioning and searching for what the answers are. There's a consciousness or a journey, a searching, for truth or knowledge. At the same time, however, you have a lot of junk food and McDonalds and Doritos and Junior Mints and....

JB: Yeah, it's really fun to play around with these kinds of details, you know. In the foodie culture we're in, McDonald's is a symbol of bad parenting.

RW: Well, it creates great tension because I think we all are those paradoxes. We're trying to be great parents, but at the same time we're still nostalgic for how our parents raised us.

JB: Well, I ate it and I'm okay.

RW: I'm okay, right? Wait... I'm okay. My husband always says to my kids, "You're lucky spanking went out of style."

JB: So funny!

RW: Your work is so layered. You can find new little things that you missed all the time.

JB: Yeah. It's hard to catch those details in a small-sized print like this. But at a bigger size, they're a little more obvious. I guess the different layers sort of represent how my brain works. One minute I'm thinking about the old days and how it's never going to be the same. Then, I'm thinking about just how can I make this kind of charming and fun? So literally, one second it's a really dark thought, and then the next second I want to laugh. And then I'm back to my dark thoughts.

RW: Maybe that's why I like you so much.... Do you wait for inspiration? Are you regimented about how you like to work?

JB: I have to be really free in lots of ways to be able to create, whether it's to blare my Cole Porter radio, or the time to go for a drive, or whatever it takes to get to a place where my mind is free to wander. But life happens around you, and you're running kids here and there, and emails are coming at you left and right. Anything and everything can keep me from being able to get into this interior space. So it sometimes feels like I'm always trying, unsuccessfully, to get to that point.

RW: Yeah and I feel like it's important that your kids know that you have to have this space in order to create.

JB: Yeah, there's a rhythm to it. I'm actually not getting a whole lot of work done right now because it's important to me to pick up my son, Owen, after school. And I like to make dinner every night and things like that. But then when I need to get going... I have to drop my standards a bit. There was one day a few years back, where I was extremely busy...I had no groceries in the house... he ended up eating croutons for breakfast.

RW: I know you've been approached by a lot of corporate work. Maybe you don't want to talk about this.

JB: Oh, I hate to shoot commercially. Too much pressure. It's hard enough to please myself. But I've done some work, like the cover story for New York magazine last year. The story was "The Feminist Housewife." And that was really fun because they wanted my particular style for the story.

It was right up my alley because my sisters and I talk about those kinds of issues all the time. The mommy blogs and the perfection many of them present to the world-posting pictures of food they bought at the farmer's market and what not.

RW: My friend calls it oppressive perfection.

JB: It is! So, the author compared it to that 1960's Donna Reed era when everything's about the appearances and they're presenting this glossy idealized version of their family life... only now it's on social media.

RW: Yeah. As a big fan of your work, I want everybody to know who you are and, well, your images are just so incredible and I think it is part of you-to show the flaws, the torn lining, and the parts that aren't so perfect or pretty. I think that's actually refreshing and that both men and women really relate to that. Especially in this culture where everything is so Instagram and cookie-cutter perfect.

JB: Everybody's crafting and just cutting up vegetables left and right. Not me!

RW: So you don't take pictures of the food that you cook?

JB: Ha ha! No!

RW: Related to that, I read an interesting article about digital photography and family photos and how now we delete the bad ones.

JB: Yeah.

RW: Remember when the bad ones were all you had? You know when your eyes were closed, you had braces, and you didn't look like you were standing up straight?

JB: Yes! One of my favorite books is The Art of the American Snapshot, with all these old Polaroid family shots. Where it's just a fragment of a foot, or someone's cat-eye glasses, weird moments... but you're right... the kinds of things that would be edited out today.

RW: Everything's so crisp and composed and only the expression that you want to convey, not what was captured. I love that you're not afraid of a crying child either.

JB: Well, whether I want them or not, sometimes that's just what happens, so you make the best of it.

RW: And there's that great one of the frowning boy holding a cupcake. He's one grumpy cupcake.

JB: Yes, that day was the day after a birthday party and my sister had made all these cupcakes with electric blue icing and she brought them over for lunch. He was eating all the icing off them while we were in the other room. So I don't know why he's so grumpy. Probably because I made him come into the other room for a picture!

RW: I love that the kids wear these clothes. These clothes just feel old-fashioned. Nobody's got a Spiderman T-shirt on or anything like that.

JB: I know. I give my sisters credit for that. They are way cooler than me. They were wearing Converse long before anyone else. I don't know how they know these things.

RW: They look cool. But it's also not slick-not hip or anything.

JB: No, it's just a certain taste and our homes are the same way. When we grew up my grandmother was like that. In her old Victorian house everything was old. I don't know, it's almost a genetic thing.

RW: This is one of my absolute favorites. I'm crazy about this image, Airstream.

JB: Thanks, Billy Collins-who wrote the introduction to this book-he told me this was one of his favorites because it was one of "those" things, spraying a kid with poison... it's protective and violent at the same time.

RW: My friend grew up in Galveston, Texas, and he always tells a story about how, because they had such bad bugs, they had a truck that would come around and spray insecticide. And the kids thought it was a fun game to pedal their bikes as fast as they could to catch up with the truck.

JB: I know! And it was DDT, wasn't it?

RW: Yes, I know, right? It's crazy, but this reminds me of that.

JB: I like how we finally realized that was a terrible thing to do...so then we just went to spraying the can of poison right directly on them.

RW: Yeah, closer! Now we just have them cover their mouth. It's crazy. And what's he eating over there?

JB: Marshmallows, of course.

RW: Of course, marshmallows.

JB: No fire yet.

RW: Yeah.

JB: You've just got to be practical sometimes and shoot the scene close even though you're making it look like it's somewhere far away. This was right in the middle of town, in an old suburban neighborhood, in an empty lot. But, we set it all up. I had just clipped the bras to the clothesline and everybody was arriving. All the kids. It hadn't been but 10-15 minutes, and the police showed up!

RW: Oh no!

JB: The police said that the neighbors told them a band of gypsies had settled in the area.

RW: Gypsies?!

JB: So, I don't know how we talked the police into letting us stay another half-hour.

RW: But you got great magic hour light on them.

JB: Yeah, well, there was this storm moving in, so just as soon as we were done it was pouring rain.

RW: So, are you excited about this new book?

JB: Yeah, I really am. I mean, this makes it a little more exciting.

RW: I'm excited. Do you get to correspond with any of the people who see your work or do people have a way to tell you how much they love it?

JB: Yeah, I get a little bit of fan mail... nothing like you do I'm sure! Sometimes, I'll meet the collectors of my work at art fairs. They'll tell me which picture they have, and where they have it hanging in their house... or what it reminds them of in their own lives. That's always so much fun.

RW: That's so great! And is it weird for you to come into my office and there's The Power of Now hanging behind my desk?

JB: It's a little surreal, yeah... that a little slice of my life made it all the way to Beverly Hills! Swimming pools... movie stars...So fun!

RW: Well, it's such a treat for me to be able to look at your work and talk about it with you.

JB: Yeah, well, Reese... me, too. Thank you.

Website

2024 Now & Then, Haw Contemporary, Kansas City, MO

2022 Metaverse, Haw Contemporary, Kansas City, MO (details)

2020 Improvising, Haw Contemporary, Kansas City, MO (details)

2020 Fever Dreams, Fotografiska, New York, NY

2019 Midwest Materials, Brick City Gallery, Missouri State University, Springfield, MO

2018 Midwest Materials, Special exhibition presented by Robert Mann Gallery in Bentonville, AR

2018 Fake Weather, Robert Klein Gallery, Boston, MA

2017 Fake Weather, Robert Mann Gallery, New York, NY

2017 Julie Blackmon: The Everyday Fantastic, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, NH

2016 Down Time, Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2014 Free Range, Robert Mann Gallery, New York, NY

2013 Homegrown, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL

2013 Undertow, Gail Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA

2012 Day Tripping, Robert Mann Gallery, NY

2012 Other Tales from Home, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY

2012 New Work, Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2012 The Power of Now and Other Tales from Home, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX

2011 Julie Blackmon, The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky

2011 Domestic Vacations, Hammer Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland

2011 Julie Blackmon, Springfield Public Art, Springfield, MO

2011 Domestic Vacations, George A. Spiva Center for the Arts, Joplin, MO

2010 Julie Blackmon, Pool Art Center Gallery, Drury University, Springfield, MO

2010 Line-Up, Robert Mann Gallery, New York, NY

2010 Julie Blackmon, Robert Klein Gallery, Boston, MA

2009 Domestic Vacations, Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2009 Domestic Vacations, SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA

2009 New Photographs, Gail Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA

2008 Domestic Vacations, Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, NY

2008 Domestic Vacations, Gail Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA

2008 Domestic Vacations, Photoeye Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

2008 Domestic Vacations, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL

2007 Domestic Vacations, Gail Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA

2007 Suspicious Origins, Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, NY

2006 Domestic Vacations, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL

2006 Julie Blackmon, Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR

2006 Julie Blackmon, Photoeye Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

2006 Good Girl Art Gallery, Springfield, MO

2006 Arts Center of the Ozarks, Fayettville, AR

2005 University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, AR

2005 Relativity, Pool Art Center, Drury University, Springfield, MO

2003 Mind Games, Randy Bacon Photography, Springfield, MO

2003 Mind Games, Discovery Center of Springfield, Springfield, MO

2020 Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Photography, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE

2019 Tread Lightly, G. Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA

2018 Adubon, Then and Now, Biggs Museum of American Art, Dover DE

2016 Back at the Water’s Edge, Robert Mann Gallery, New York, NY

2014 State of the Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK

2014 Framed & Ready, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL

2012 What I Was Thinking: 25 Year Anniversary, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL

2012 New Artists | New Works, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, UK

2011 At the Water’s Edge, Robert Mann Gallery, New York, NY

2011 Still.Life, Jennifer Schwartz Gallery, Atlanta, GA

2010 Constructed Spaces: Contemporary Color Photography, Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD

2010 Proof, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL

2010 Hide in Seek: Picturing Childhood, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO

2008 Presumed Innocent, DeCordova Museum, Boston, MA

2008 Pure Pleasure, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO

2008 Photo Electric, Claire Oliver Fine Art, New York, NY

2007 KIDS, Brown University, Providence, RI

2007 Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, NY

2006 Chick Flick, Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle, WA

2006 American Eden, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York, NY

2006 Domestic Diaries, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL

2006 Family Pack, Society for Contemporary Photography, Kansas City, MO

2005 Group Portrait, Boston University, Photographic Resource Center, Boston, MA

2005 Selections from Photographers’ Showcase, Photoeye Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

2004 Current Works, Society For Contemporary Photography, Kansas City, MO

2004 MPP, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL

2004 PhotoSpiva, Joplin, MO

2003 Good Girl Art Gallery, Springfield, MO

Review: Julie Blackmon’s absorbing photography of everyday Midwestern life; or is it?, LA Times (details)

A Tale of Motherhood in Julie Blackmon’s Playful Photographs, Hyperallergic (details)

Homegrown: American Unease, Lens Culture (details)

Julie Blackmon's Surreal Photos Show the Chaos of Being a Parent, Vice (details)

 

2008 American Photo's Emerging Photographer of 2008

2007 PDN’s 30

2006 Critical Mass Book Award Winner, for Domestic Vacations

2006 Santa Fe Center for Photography Project Competition, 1st Place, for Domestic Vacations

2006 Photospiva, 1st Place, for body of work, Domestic Vacations

2005 Photospiva, 1st Place, for body of work, Mind Games