Julie McClure
Artist's Statement
I began taking photographs when I was thirteen years old. My father went to Dartmouth College and we visited there over the summers for a few weeks. My parents took seminars and for the children there were any number of things that you could participate in, one of those things was photography. I had always spent many hours at my grandmother's pouring over the photo albums and boxes of family photographs, partially because I was bored with no other children to play with but my brother, so I thought that photography might be interesting. In that small New Hampshire town, I first learned to take a picture, to develop the film and to print the final picture. I have done other things but photography is one of the few things that I continue to return to when I need inspiration. When I started out, I took pictures of landscapes, particularly woods and water, but years later, as a high school English teacher, I was suckered into taking on the yearbook.
I learned quickly that my students had no access to cameras and the school wouldn't buy them so I bought a few point and shoots that my students could use, and to make sure we had enough pictures of more than just my staff's friends, I wandered around taking pictures of students most days during my spare time and after school.
It was during this time that I began to love taking pictures of people. It was also when I was teaching that I came to realize how important the women in my life had been and continue to be. My grandmothers were both strong women who defied the traditional roles of their times by starting and running their own businesses and driving cross country under dangerous conditions. My mother, although she assumed a very traditional role, encouraged me to pick any role I wanted for myself, and my aunt was always there to fill in where my very strong mother could not. So when I was picking a subject, the women in my family seemed to be a natural subject.
The process of photographing my mother, my aunt, my niece, my sister-in-law and myself was both trying and fun. I know that I look like my mother, people tell me I do all the time, but I think that it is more in the gestures and expressions when it becomes most obvious as in Linda and Julie. I never would have said that my niece and my mother had much in common, but clearly they have the same expressions in Linda and Kate. My aunt asked me to make her look like Christie Brinkley, and I tried in Cheryl. My sister-in-law just looked put upon when I started taking her picture, so I had to take it when she wasn't looking. My niece is so used to having her photograph taken that she just ignores me most of the time when I have a camera out, and my mother begged me to get rid of all of her wrinkles. But throughout the process I couldn't help but remember my close relationship with my grandmothers, pouring through those photo albums and the quote from Judy Chicago: "Remember our heritage is our power; we can know ourselves and our capacities by seeing that other women have been strong."
