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Matinee: Julia Fullerton-Batten
25 March 2023
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 493rd in our series of Saturday matinees today: Julia Fullerton-Batten: Contortion.
In this 1:21 video, fine art photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten talks about her project Contortion, which was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize this year.
The U.K. photographer is a Hasselblad Master whose use of unusual locations, staged settings, street-cast models and cinematic lighting distinguish her work. She describes her images as being like "a split second of a film."
Fullerton-Batten moved to the U.K. to complete her secondary education after growing up in Germany and the U.S. She studied photography in college after which she spent five years as an assistant to professional photographers.
She took her first commercial assignment in 1995 and gained recognition as a fine art photographer in 2005. Her series Teenage Stories from the years was the first of several explorations that included In Between (2009 to 2010), Awkward (2011), Mothers and Daughters (2012), A Testament to Love (2013) and Renaissance (2013).
Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Financial Times, Vogue Korea and Le Monde, among others. And she has been exhibited widely in Europe.
Contortion was the project she worked on in lockdown during the pandemic. She's always been fascinated by young women who want to be contortionists, she says.
A Chinese and Mongolian tradition, it has become popular in the U.K. recently. And a new subject for Fullerton-Batten, who treats us to a few of the images as she describes the project.
We get the feeling looking at her work that fine art is no stretch at all for her.