INTERVIEW

Steve Fairclough meets the fine-art photographer who embarked on an ambitious portrait project during the London lockdowns

Julia Fullerton- Batten

Fine-art photographer

Julia Fullerton-Batten was born in Bremen, Germany, in 1970 and has since lived in the US and the UK. She is an acclaimed fine-art photographer who is known for large-scale projects that use unusual locations, creative settings, street-cast models and cinematic lighting styles.

She rose to prominence in the fine art world with her project Teenage Stories (2005), which told the story of a teenage girl’s journey to womanhood and resulted in a book in 2007. Since then she has been prolific in producing over a dozen projects on social issues, including Feral Children in 2015, which re-enacted 15 cases of feral children; and 2016’s TheAct, a study of 15 women who were active in the sex industry.

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne and the Parliamentary Art Collection in the Houses of Parliament. Fullerton-Batten has won dozens of awards around the world for her commercial and fine-art work, and is a Hasselblad Ambassador.

www.juliafullertonbatten.com

Kitty, Lockdown Day 92.

Julia Fullerton-Batten

Ona mid-September afternoon, fine-art photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten is peering at me through my iPad’s rectangular screen, during a Zoom call from her home in West London... it’s an apt scenario because Fullerton-Batten spent much of the Covid lockdown period peering in on, and photographing, the lives of people who were looking out of the windows of their homes. Although many people have already have seen the unforgettable pictorial results of some of those shoots on her Instagram feed, Fullerton-Batten is now self-publishing a selection of images from the project in book form.

During 2020, Fullerton-Batten lost a couple of commissions due to the impact of the Covid lockdowns in the UK, and took the decision to abandon a personal project she had started. But she rapidly realised that the lockdowns provided a period during which she could document the isolation and sense of entrapment many people were feeling after being told to stay at home by the British government. Her penchant for storytelling with staged imagery fitted this project perfectly: the pictures have garnered widespread praise, including The Telegraph Magazine’s director of photography, Andy Greenacre, choosing one of her images as his Picture of the Year.