12 People You Need to Know in 2016: Julie Blackmon

Perhaps it’s the baby about to plop in the pool while mom sunbathes unaware or the toddler standing in a highchair unattended. Doesn’t that dad know you can’t toss a terrified baby in the air? This isn’t 1950. And, wait, is that an open flame around which children cluster alone amid flammable brush while one holds a stick topped by an on-fire hot dog?

Welcome to Julie Blackmon’s world, where charm is off-kilter, beauty belies danger and an unsettling creepiness exists. Should we be concerned by the boy, only his head visible, staring into a dark attic at the disembodied plastic doll head? Does that mother, searching in her car, know her baby has crossed the street?

Blackmon was captivated by photography as a student at Missouri State University, but she didn’t plan life as a photographer with work in galleries from New York to London. The Springfield native left MSU for marriage and motherhood. Then she saw the darkroom.

But first, she saw the house. In 1980, Blackmon went to an open house with her parents in center city Springfield. She fell in love with the old house and readily bought it years later, relishing the abode in which the Ozark Mountain Daredevils once recorded in the shag-carpeted basement.

There, Blackmon discovered the old darkroom of the first photography business in town. She bought an enlarger 18 months later and started with black-and-white photos.

“It just seemed like it was meant to be when I saw the darkroom,” she says. “I had just always been in love with photographers. I guess I wanted to be my own version of Sally Mann. I felt moved by her and by photography in general. I felt like I had something to say.”

That initial work, Mind Games, won Blackmon a 2004 honorable mention at the Santa Fe Center for Photography Project Competition. She won first place in 2006 with her color work, Domestic Vacations.

“I then had the galleries coming to me. I didn’t have to do much,” Blackmon says. “I remember this gallerist calling me from West Hollywood. It was a little overwhelming. Up to that point, I had been doing it just for me. I wasn’t thinking about making it a career.”

Her work now hangs in the offices of the likes of actress Reese Witherspoon.

Dutch painter Jan Steen, a humorist who depicted boisterous family scenes, is one of Blackmon’s influences. Another is her experience as the eldest of nine children growing up in the Rountree neighborhood where she still lives. The contrast between then and now – children playing without parents knowing their whereabouts verses the orchestrated environments of today’s play dates – infuses Blackmon’s lens.

“I grew up in the ’70s. It was kind of a time when we had a world separate from my parents,” she says. “I remember sitting at the top of the stairs watching my parents having cocktail parties, but we had our whole other world.”

The photographer’s humor reflects the tension of being a mother in the age of helicopter parents and teacup kids.

“It’s taking something I know to be true but exaggerating it in a way that tells the truth,” she says.