When she was in her 30s, Julie Blackmon moved into an old house in Springfield, Missouri, which had a darkroom in its basement. She began taking photographs seriously – but never quite in earnest – choreographing the lives and objects around her. Her pictures are full of painterly references; one model was 17th-century Dutch scenes of domestic life, those curious curated freeze frames that prefigured Instagram. Another was storytelling, as Blackmon’s husband wrote fiction – and if he could “borrow details and ideas from real life, and then exaggerate or stylise them for the sake of the story”, why couldn’t she?
