Julia Fullerton-Batten’s Incredible Shrinking Women

Anyhoo…

Martin Schoeller’s Ryan Hall portrait got me thinking of perspective and size and illusion. And then I was flipping through the front of The New Yorker, and huzzah! Some Julia Fullerton-Batten work from her series Teenage Stories popped right out at me. This work isn’t new, but it’s got staying power and is showing in a group show now at Jenkins Johnson.

I thought it was fair game for a post– it must be new to some of you! I found a nice little interview with Fullerton-Batten over at Influx; excerpts are below.

Also, in case you’re wondering; they didn’t enlarge the girls– they shrank the buildings.

What were you trying to convey with “Teenage Stories”?

The idea was to create pictures that reflect my own meandering
childhood memories of my sisters and me growing up in Pennsylvania and
then in rural Germany. When I think back to how the three of us spent
our time drifting through life I realize that the older we get the
harder it is to spend time this way, every day seems to have an agenda,
a set of objectives that must be achieved.

The starting point for most of these pictures were observations I made
of myself, or my sisters, during these wonderful years. I wanted to
capture something of this “child-like ability” to get lost in dreams
and fantasies in these pictures.

P&O, 2005

As soon as I saw the first of the miniature village I knew it was the
perfect backdrop for this series. The strangeness of these environments
perfectly echoes the strangeness I feel when I raid my own memories
looking for events that I can turn into pictures.

However it often leaves me wondering whether I’m glamorizing my own
childhood and if so then why? Recently I went back to our family home
in Pennsylvania, the first visit since we left in 1980. It didn’t seem
possible that my beautiful childhood memories had been born in this
bland suburban wasteland.

The girls I photograph in these miniature villages interact with them
much like children interact with their real surroundings, living inside
their own dreams and fantasies rather than living in a specific house
on a specific street. In their minds they can be giants moving through
our world whilst always remaining separate to it, cocooned in their own
dream like existence.

Which contemporary photographers have influenced you?

Jeff Wall, Guy Bourdin, Garry Winogrand, Bill Henson, Susan Paulsen, Huger Foote

Read the full interview at Influx.
See more of Fullerton-Batten’s work.