This week we welcome Julia Forrest, a Brooklyn-based photographer. She strictly uses film and prints in a custom-built darkroom within her apartment. In this digital world, she continues to work with traditional processing, and uses the camera as a tool of showing reality, and to experiment with what she can do in front of a lens.
Julia is currently working as a teaching artist at the Brooklyn Museum, Lehman College, and the Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. As an instructor, she thinks it is important to understand that a person can constantly stretch and push the boundaries of their ideas with whatever medium they choose.
Her goal is for her audience to not only enjoy learning about photography, but to see the world in an entirely new way and continue to develop a future interest in the arts.
“Using a medium format film camera and no digital manipulation, I create an illusion within the lens. I am inspired by 1890’s Pictorialist photographers and how they create a purely photographic reality in their images,” writes Forrest. “Shooting in black and white, I make a historical reference to this period.
I use Infrared film to emphasize the grain and to create a more surreal and distant reality. I challenge the notion of the landscape by referencing what makes a photograph: the women use their mirror to re-frame what I have framed and capture in their mirror like a camera captures in the lens.”
See more Forrest’s work on her website and Instagram.
Read more of our artist profiles here.
