CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/16/2022

'Julie Blackmon: Midwest Materials' is NEW from Radius Books

"Sidewalk" is reproduced from Julie Blackmon: Midwest Materials, the photographer's third monograph with Radius Books. Collecting 45 color images that exemplify Blackmon's experience of Springfield, Missouri, where her large extended family still lives, this evocative and beautifully-produced hardcover focuses on "home and the rituals that unfold in backyards, attics and garages," Leah Ollman writes. "Each frame in her ongoing epic is an absorbing, meticulously orchestrated slice of ethnographic theater starring a tribe of scuffed and shirtless nieces, nephews, neighbors, and friends. If the enjoyment of theater requires us to suspend disbelief, to temporarily accept as true the artifice we’re presented, the fullest appreciation of photography asks of us the opposite: to suspend our reflexive belief, to accept (and further, to embrace) as artifice what appears to be truth. Since Blackmon practices photography as theater, she traffics in the seductive illusions and entrancing deceptions of both mediums. Hers is an elaborate and sophisticated act of make-believe. An act of serious mischief. Also, perhaps, an act of frustrated faith, an act of longing."