Julia Fullerton-Batten
- Photographer
- United Kingdom
- Member since 2011
BIOGRAPHY
Julia Fullerton-Batten is a worldwide acclaimed and exhibited fine-art photographer. Her body of work now encompasses major projects spanning a decade of engagement in fine-art photography.
The foundation of her success was 'Teenage Stories' (2005), an evocative narrative of the transition of a teenage girl to womanhood. It portrays the different stages and life situations of an adolescent girl's transition to womanhood as she grapples with the vulnerability of her teenage predicament – adjustments to a new body, her emotional development and changes in her social standing. Her book ‘Teenage Stories’ was published in 2007*.
Julia freely admits to there being a semi-autobiographical element in much of her earlier work, and recounts often falling back on recollections of her own early and teenage years, living in Germany, the USA and the UK, her parent’s divorce, and her own early relationships.
Her latest projects consider social issues. In her most recent project ‘Feral Children, 2015’, Julia re-enacts fifteen reported cases of feral children with child actors. The cases involve a variety of different circumstances in which children were rejected or abused by their parents, others got lost or left in the wild, and some were captured by wild animals.
Fullerton-Batten was born in Bremen, Germany. Her early life was spent in Germany and the USA. After her parent’s divorce she and her siblings moved to the UK with her English father where she completed her secondary education. She studied photography and assisted professional photographers for five years before a first commercial assignment kick-started her career in 1995. She now lives in London with her husband and two young boys.
Julia’s use of unusual locations, highly creative settings, street-cast models, accented with cinematic lighting are hallmarks of her very distinctive style of photography. She insinuates visual tensions in her fine-art images, and imbues them with a hint of mystery, which combine to tease the viewer to re-examine the picture, each time seeing more content and finding a deeper meaning. These distinctive qualities have established enthusiasts for her work worldwide and at all ends of the cultural spectrum, from casual viewers to connoisseurs of fine-art photography.
Julia was commissioned by The National Portrait Gallery in London to shoot portraits of leading people in the UK National Health Service, which are now held in a permanent collection in the Gallery. Her images are also in permanent collection at the Musee de l'Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland. She was a winner of the HSBC Fondation pour la Photographie award, and is a Hasselblad Master. Her images were on the front covers of 'A Guide to Collecting Contemporary Photography' (Thames and Hudson, 2012) and Eyemazing Magazine.
Over the past five years, Julia has been a guest speaker at many international events including: National Geographic Seminar in Washington DC, USA; Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden; Dong Gang Photo festival, Korea, and Noorderlicht, International Festival of Photography, Norway.
Recent major international events that she has attended as exhibitor include Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden (solo show ‘ Staged Reality’ ); Noorderlicht International Festival of Photography, Kristiansund, Norway; Dong Gang Photo Festival, Korea, Daegu Photo Biennale, Korea; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Spain; Fundacion Caja, Madrid, Spain; Pompidou Center, Paris, France; Shanghai International Photographic Art Exhibition, China; The Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai (MOCA Shanghai), China; and Hereford Photo Festival, UK.
In addition, Julia has adjudicated at many photographic competitions, including the Taylor Wessing Awards for National Portrait Gallery, and the Sony World Photography Awards.
* Teenage Stories, Publisher: Actes Sud, 2007; ISBN 978-2-7427-6833-2
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