Julia Tarantino

  • Julia Tarantino

  • Thesis

  • "Julia Tarantino was born in Cranbury, New Jersey. At age 18 she moved to New York to obtain a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design. She resides in NYC, where she works as a freelance photographer. Her work extends across multiple genres such as fashion, fine art, diaristic, and landscape. She focuses on portraying unconventional ways we can approach identity and individualism. Her work can be seen printed in Gayletter Volume. 11 for an NIHL fashion feature. She has also been exhibited on the online publication Milk where she worked on a video for their Next-Gen 2020 series."

  • The shadow is a term Carl Jung coined as one of his archetypes for human existence. The shadow is our other half, the hidden truth of who we are. In every person lies a version too ugly to face, so it lives behind the repression barrier in our unconscious. I sought out to create a series of black and white self portraits of my shadow. The shadow is a window into all of the parts of ourselves that we need to work through in order to become the best versions of ourselves. The process of documenting my shadow is a journey attempting to visually make my face and body unrecognizable to the viewer, just like how our shadows lie unnoticed in our psyche. The photographs are a way to make peace with and let go of what my shadow turned me into. By exposing my shadow to the world it will explore deeper phenomena about all of the untapped versions of ourselves floating around in our unconscious, waiting to be discovered.
    most 500 words.