Fullerton-Batten is best known for her investigations of teenage girls, their psyches, and their relationships with others. Teenage Stories (2005) was the first of her explorative series, and in it, she heightens and emphasizes the girls’ feelings of not belonging by photographing them as giants amid miniature villages. Later series like School Play (2007), In Between (2009 – 2010), Awkward (2011), Mothers and Daughters (2012), and A Testament to Love (2013) look at these growing girls’ relationships with friends, boys, and family, as well. Her recent series Renaissance (2013) reflects her subject’s state of minds. Fullerton-Batten’s series show regular people who, although seemingly emotionless, truly bring us closer to understanding the inner workings of the mind.
Julia was born in 1970 and she lives and works in London.
Julia Fullerton-Batten was born in Bremen, Germany. Her early life was spent in Germany and the USA, but after her parent’s divorce she and her siblings moved to the UK. There she completed her secondary education, then studied photography at college. Subsequently she assisted professional photographers for five years before a first commercial assignment kick-started her career in 1995, and first gained recognition as a fine-art photographer in 2005.
Fullerton-Batten is best known for her investigations of teenage girls, their psyches, and their relationships with others. Teenage Stories (2005) was the first of her explorative series, and in it, she heightens and emphasizes the girls’ feelings of not belonging by photographing them as giants amid miniature villages. Later series like School Play (2007), In Between (2009 – 2010), Awkward (2011), Mothers and Daughters (2012), and A Testament to Love (2013) look at these growing girls’ relationships with friends, boys, and family, as well. Her recent series Renaissance (2013) reflects her subject’s state of minds. Fullerton-Batten’s series show regular people who, although seemingly emotionless, truly bring us closer to understanding the inner workings of the mind.
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 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.
Fullerton-Batten’s work has received much critical acclaim and has been featured in The New Yorker, Financial Times, Vogue Korea, and Le Monde, among others. She was commissioned by The National Portrait Gallery in London to shoot portraits of leading people in the UK National Health Service. She won the 2019 LensCulture Visual Storytelling Award and is a Hasselblad Master. Her work was the covering image for Thames and Hudson’s 2009 book A Guide to Collecting Contemporary Photography. She has shown at esteemed international institutions like the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; Museo Thyssen-Bomemisza, Madrid; the Swedish Museum of Photography; Musee de l’Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland; and a solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Julia currently lives in London.