Julia Hadji-Stylianou completed a foundation degree at De Montfort Universirty in 2009, she then went on to pursue a Bachelors Degree in photography and video in 2012, and then followed by a Masters Degree in photography in 2014. She now currently works as an image re toucher for Next. A lot of Julias art work focuses on making a connection between identity, sense of self, places and location.
At the beginning of the artist talk Julia talks more into depths about her themes. The idea that identity has a lot of sub categories such as gender identity, social identity, it can be massively influenced and shaped by people, nationality, community, or it can be influenced from just doing your normal day to day life. She talks about being half British and half Greek and goes on to say she’s been travelling between the two her whole life, she constantly shifts from one place to another, she has explored how the land and location is also a big influence with your identity. Julia follows on by talking about the fact that our identity’s shift and change over time, everyone is constantly changing which she demonstrates from self portraiture and portraiture photography.
Here is a long exposure portrait created by Julia, she felt that the long exposure photography really reflected our identity being obscured, shifting and changing, She then developed her portraits further by adding glitch art on top of the long exposure portraits. The glitch going across their faces communicates lost or blurred identity, relating to dreams and dream theories.
Julia then moves onto talking about her next series the ‘non compos mentis’ in this project Julia focuses more on the conscious mind instead of dream theory. The conscious mind is everything we are aware of such as our emotions. Julia explains that she had bad anxiety that really affected her however she used this within her work she wanted to portray her mental health within her portraits. The long exposures are meant to indicate in this series doubt and unpredictability, and how her mind was spiraling.
Julia scouted out abandoned places to take more portraits for this series, the location massively influences the photographs more giving it the ‘run down’ look. The purpose of finding abandoned places Julia explains she wants to communicate the idea of her mind and her world feeling run down alongside the exposure. Her imagery is slightly desaturated in colour to convey this notion mental health, depression and anxiety can suck the colour out of you and it can be very physically and mentally tiring and draining.
