Portrait Photography: Julie Cockburn

Julie Cockburn is an artist who lives and is based in the uk. Cockburn work has been in many different exhibitions and her work is included and shown in many collections world wide in the UK, Europe and the United States. Cockburns work involves of finding old 1950's portrait photographs and sort of modernises them and brings them back to life so there is a link between them the past and present in her work. Cockburn uses lots of different skills, techniques and materials to be able to manipulate the faces of these people in the photographs. 

Cockburn uses a lot of found photographs of women in her work I feel to try and contend against lots of rules and stereotypes of women back in the 1950's a before of she's tried to show how society and women have changed. Back in the 1950's were supposed to fulfil certain roles, such as a caring mother, a homemaker, cleaner and an obedient wife. Nowadays women are free and can do many things that men can do know with no rules against them. I feel that this manipulated portraits such as this one at the top called Blue Tattoo shows how if a women wants to now she can get as many tattoos as she likes, and I think its good that you can still see through the embroidering because it shows how women would've had to been presentable back in the 1950's.

Cockburn also uses techniques like cutting and collaging to be able to make these unique mysterious portraits. I think these portraits are quite intriguing and mysterious because of how on some Julie Cockburn has completely taken apart and manipulated the people faces in the images. When the images are completely manipulated and hard to see it is hard to figure out the persons identity and any information about them or why Cockburn has done this to there face. I feel that Cockburn does this on purpose by using found photographs of people years ago instead of taking her own photographs of people and/or celebrities so that people think more about why Cockburn could of done a certain techniques/manipulation to a particular persons face. Especially when I was looking at these two collage type photograph down below it made me think more about the photograph and try to look more into detail of the meaning. It also reminded me of a sort of puzzle that I could try to solve in my head to unmask the persons identity. Cockburn said herself at the Photographers gallery interview "By collaging a found image with embroidery thread, plasticine, sticky back plastic or tacky found objects it becomes a new image with a new history to unfurl and, by association, a new memory".