Julie Blackmon Homegrown Food

Award-winning photographer Julie Blackmon draws inspiration from 17th-century painters. In a very playful way, the American artist makes images that are both autobiographical and fictional, introducing playful updates to the scenes of rowdy tavern interiors that Flemish and Dutch artists created centuries ago with the chaotic situations that family life can bring to the fore. 

Blackmon was born in Springfield, Missouri. She studied at Missouri State University, where she discovered her passion for photography through the works of Sally Mann and Diane Arbus. She didn't formally return to photography until many years later — as a mother of three — and for much of her initial work, Blackmon found compelling subject matter in her very own living room. 

Blackmon’s first major series "Mind Games" won an honorable mention in a 2004 competition at the Santa Fe Center for Photography, as well as an award from the Society of Contemporary Photography in Kansas City, Missouri.

From there, Blackmon's career gained considerable traction. She followed up her inaugural series — which comprised black and white documentary images — with a full-color series that depicted both imagined and realistic domestic situations within the home. Blackmon continued working primarily in color, exploring new scenarios and framing cinematic conceptual shots in hayfields, parking lots and neighbors’ backyards.

Blackmon has exhibited at galleries all over the United States. Her work is held in many public and private collections including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Microsoft Art Collection in Washington and the Fotografiska Museum in New York City. 

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The first permanent image created by a camera — which materialized during the 1820s — is attributed to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The French inventor was on to something for sure. Kodak introduced roll film in the 1880s, allowing photography to become more democratic, although cameras wouldn’t be universally accessible until several decades later. 

Digital photographic techniques, software, smartphone cameras and social-networking platforms such as Instagram have made it even easier in the modern era for budding photographers to capture the world around them as well as disseminate their images far and wide. 

What might leading figures of visual art such as Andy Warhol have done with these tools at their disposal?

Today, when we aren’t looking at the digital photos that inundate us on our phones, we look to the past to celebrate the photographers who have broken rules as well as records — provocative and prolific artists like Horst P. Horst, Lillian Bassman and Helmut Newton, who altered the face of fashion and portrait photography; visionary documentary photographers such as Gordon Parks, whose best-known work was guided by social justice; and pioneers of street photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who shot for revolutionary travel magazines like Holiday with the likes of globetrotting society lensman Slim Aarons.

Find photographers you may not know in Introspective and The Study — where you’ll read about Berenice Abbott, who positioned herself atop skyscrapers for the perfect shot, or “conceptual artist-adventurer” Charles Lindsay, whose work combines scientific rigor with artistic expression, or Massimo Listri, known for his epic interiors of opulent Old World libraries. Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron was given a Kodak camera as a child. Later, she shot on Polaroid film before buying her first 35mm camera in her teens. Barron's stunning portraits of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Warhol and other artists chronicle a crucial chapter of New York’s cultural history.

Throughout the past two centuries, photographers have used their medium to create expressive work that has resonated for generations. Shop a voluminous collection of this powerful fine photography on 1stDibs. Search by photographer to find the perfect piece for your living room wall, or spend some time with the work organized under various categories, such as landscape photography, nude photography and more.