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| Artist Intro |
"Different Stories" |
| Artist name / Photographer |
Julia Fullerton-Batten
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This first solo exhibition by the talented photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten introduces her remarkable personal images. The Special Photographers Company expect it to be a great success.
Julia Fullerton-Batten is a young photographer who has already got a very solidly established career as a commercial photographer. Having won a number of Association of Photographers Assistants' Awards, she moved on to completing an impressive number of commissions for international advertising agencies in her own name. This is her first solo exhibition, and the level of interest before the exhibition even opened has been quite remarkable.
The photographer herself agrees that the images are hard to describe. Shot around the world as Julia has been travelling on commercial assignments, these are not travel pictures as most people would recognise them. Similarly, although many of them are in practice interior views, no-one would describe them as interior photography. With elements of still-life and elements of autobiography they are truly blended into something wholly the photographers' own. Made in a luscious palette of almost sub-aqueous colours, with an eye that finds whole worlds in the details, these are the pictures of somebody whose seeing is intimately allied to memory and to thought. They are not far from the great journeyings of Bernard Plossu, who managed to photograph as though seeing always out of the corner of his eye, to analyse and codify later. Julia Fullerton-Batten has a similar oblique view, photographing often the one angle that nobody else would see.
What results is a marvellous sense that the pictures always have more to give on every repeated viewing: precisely the opposite of the dumbed-down, immediate-hit photography that we have grown so used in the magazines.
These are splendidly thoughtful pictures, beautifully seen and made. Julia Fullerton-Batten has the knack of making each image a doorway into reverie and poetry, even while solidly looking at the hard world that surrounds her. A fishbowl on the edge of a bath, a ball of wool, a paper cup by some barely parted curtains: out of such tiny things she makes her world. She calls them Different Stories - and she's right. We come alive as we see these images, gently led by a master photographer into thinking beyond fact to metaphor and suddenly the world seems a little different.
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