Bio

Julianna Martin is a photographer and artist from Truckee, CA and is primarily based in Princeton, NJ. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree at Princeton University where she is studying Visual Art, Art History, and Entrepreneurship. Her main academic focus is analog and experimental photography, and she is interested in alternative processes such as mordançage and Polaroid emulsion lifts, as well as how her own practice intersects with the broader history of photography. She is also passionate about working with arts communities through public engagement and programming. Julianna discovered her love for photography in early high school, and has run her own commercial portrait photography business since 2019.

Artist Statement

In my own work I'm often thinking about place, decay and aging, fragments of the body, and physical processes where I can break apart the layers of a photograph or think about it as an unflattened and layered object. I'm currently working on projects involving Polaroid emulsion lifts and video projection, mordançage (lifting up the emulsion of darkroom prints), and traditional darkroom printing. My work aims to explore a tension between process-based photographic work and conventional photographs that emphasize subject matter.

My artistic process is driven by a desire to unravel or complicate how we think about the medium of photography, and understand the role photographs play in this contemporary moment. I'm interested in the slowness and materiality of analog methods as a way of resisting the excess and rapid speed of digital photography.