Kaegan Sparks
Curator's Statement

Lenses converge and refract; they can cloud our vision or sharpen our surroundings. Julia Blaukopf's photographs do a little of both, evoking themes of estrangement through their frugality of color, multifaceted perspectives, and unnerving energy, yet still retaining an arresting intimacy as well. The works of the show provoke questions of barriers, geographical, linguistic, and cultural, with a piercing precision. Simultaneously, they demand us to recognize their apparent similarities.

The distinctions of three seemingly polar locales — Europe, Africa, our own West Philadelphia — blur together through Blaukopf's works to disorient the viewer. At a glance, one would hardly realize the crumbling elegance of the stone church in Rubble Fence is only a few blocks away, or notice the parallel themes presented in the adjacent photograph, Boots. What we see is a barrier between what is inside and what is out, whether it be a chain-link fence surrounding an old church, or a makeshift picket for drying boots in a Kenyan pasture. The links between the different scenes make their incongruities all the more striking; consider, for example, the analogous marketplaces of Kenya and Prague, or the disparity between the Polish edifice of East Dawn and its counterpart straw hut in The Cook. The exotic meshes with the industrial as Kenyan back roads juxtapose Philadelphia power plants and our stereotypes of foreign and familiar clash to produce intriguing visual foils. Who would guess that the same wiry silhouettes of Monkey Trees, Glancing Up, and Auschwitz can represent wild shrubs, telephone wires, and the barbed fence of a death camp?

Blaukopf's work also confronts us with other types of boundaries. Through her deliberate distortions and filtered images, her scenes may reflect all too poignantly the veils on our own perception of the external world. What we see does not necessarily mirror the processed and perhaps prejudiced image of our minds' eye. Blaukopf captures the world through literal screens in some of her photographs, as the van window of The Market, and through more subtle abstract ones in others. Some of the most compelling antitheses in the show fuse in Purity: a mysterious haze seems to sully a child isolated in a dry field, which, though apparently barren, is in actuality a nursery for freshly planted trees, a place of growth and renewal. Our understanding of a place is continuously influenced by emotions and judgments removed from the visual realm. The photos themselves are yet another reiteration the concept of barriers; the photographer's aesthetic imposes one more lens to delineate the schisms between 'here' and 'there.' Blaukopf's photographs question the viewer — what is really 'foreign'?

Blaukopf acknowledges those distinctions and connections in and between her works with a compelling delicacy, emphasizing her position in the countries she photographs as "an outsider looking in." It may well be the willingness to look that makes all the difference.