Julie Buck

Julie Anne Buck (born December 9, 1974) is an  American  collage artist,  photographer,  filmmaker, and film  archivist who lives in  New York City.

Life
Buck studied at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. After graduating, she became the manager for the Harvard Film Archive at Harvard University. While sorting and preserving films in the Archive's collection, she and her friend and co-archivist Karin Segal became interested in the images of women (known as "China girls") which often appear on the leaders of older films. Buck and Segal began the long process of digitally cleaning, restoring and printing these enigmatic images for an art exhibit titled "Girls On Film," a visual tribute to the many anonymous women who worked in the film industry.

At the same time, Buck began to experiment with collage. Her first large-format collage, Black-Haired Girl: Karin, depicted Segal, with a challenging stare, raising a glass of orange juice at the viewer. Buck has created three collage series to date—"Black-Haired Girls," "Heads" and "Blank Slate"—and has also completed two commissioned works. In college, Buck received a 1950 Rolleiflex camera that had been owned by her great-grandfather and began using it to take pictures. "Self-Centered," a series of black-and-white photographs of herself wearing various articles of clothing in deliberately staged surroundings, was the result. Recently, after a number of years away from school, Buck decided to pursue her interests in narrative filmmaking. She graduated from Columbia University's film school in 2011 with an emphasis in film production.

[edit] Works
Buck's collage work tends to traverse the fine line between purely visually representative art and abstract depictions of the personality traits of her subjects. Her black-and-white photograph series, "Self-Centered," is reminiscent of the work of Cindy Sherman, reflecting both Buck's sense of humor and her keen interest in classic film. The black-and-white and color prints of the "Girls On Film" series are both familiar and enigmatic; they are based on the anonymous China Girls that used to appear in the leaders of film reels.

Buck's work has been exhibited in galleries in Columbus, Ohio; Boston; Cambridge and New York City.