Julia Fullerton-Batten
“ I didn’t know I could do photography,
but I thought that to take pictures
was the best thing ever”
My sister ended up becoming a model, and I ended
up on the other side of the camera, so fashion was
something that was very much in our lives.
At some point I realised that fashion wasn’t really
the direction in which to go. But what I still love about
fashion photography is – when I look at the work of
Nick Knight, Miles Aldridge and a lot of the really
good fashion photographers – that it’s incredibly
creative and very open-minded. I’d be open to shoot
fashion, but it’s not the route I’ve gone down.
Did fashion photography influence your
style of photography?
Not really. To begin with I was shooting commercial
photography, mainly because I was assisting
commercial photographers – from food to still-life,
a bit of fashion and commercial ads. I was a member
of the Association of Photographers, and they had
Assistants’ Awards. I’d just been on a trip to Vietnam
and I took pictures of what I saw there... always
shooting with a camera on a tripod, and moving
things around according to how I wanted to stage it.
I was very influenced by [William] Eggleston,
whose work I loved, but his work was much more
about grabbing the moment, while I was staging.
I would maybe photograph a still-life in a mirror or
a girl’s hands crocheting on a table, but you wouldn’t
see her face. I won the Assistants’ Awards with those
images. Then I got an agent quite quickly, which
meant I started getting commissions, and that
freed me up from having to be an assistant.
Above: Maddison and family,
Lockdown Day 386.Was winning that award your big break?
Definitely. I had two big breaks. The other one was
getting into the art world by entering the HSBC
Awards in France. I was shooting a personal project
called Teenage Stories, which was relating to my
childhood. I entered that into the HSBC Awards. With
that I got a book published by Actes Sud, had five
different exhibitions at prestigious galleries in Europe
and also one in New York – that got me more into the
art world. My work started to be shown in art fairs...
a lot of them were in the United States. Then a lot
of galleries started contacting me. So those
were the two important breakthroughs.Did you have the idea for the Looking Out From
Within project early on during the first lockdown?
Well, it was a very surreal time. Suddenly the
children were at home and we had to be teachers;
home schooling was quite tough. I had a couple
of commissions that got cancelled, and I pulled the
plug on a personal shoot that I’d been working on.
I felt I had to record this very strange time in our
lives. To begin with, I would photograph people
on the street because it was very surrealJulia Fullerton-Battenhttp://www.digitalcameraworld.com FEBRUARY 2022 DIGITAL CAMERA^121