Julie Blackmon

The photographer Julie Blackmon's precisely choreographed domestic scenes apply an uncanny sense of balance, color composition, and proportion to households in various states of child-provoked disarray. The results hearken back to the work of 17th century Dutch painters like Vermeer and Jan Steen—a "Jan Steen household," after all, was once shorthand for a hectic home—and draw on the artist's own sprawling family: one of nine children, Blackmon has three of her own, and they often appear in her photographs.

Her work creates a world where children reign supreme in large modern gothic homes, and parents, when visible, appear as if caught in between the dream of adult and childhood. The scenes aren't so much surreal as it is exaggerated, mythic—with a minimal precision that compliments the chaos at hand.

Blackmon's photographs have won numerous awards from such institutions as the Santa Fe Center for Photography and Photospiva, and has appeared in group and solo exhibitions at galleries such as Robert Mann in New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography, among others. Her monograph, Domestic Vacations, was published by Radius Press in 2008.