Julie Anderson

Julie Anderson was a photographer who came to St. Louis in the early 1980s and made her name photographing dancers. Born in Hawaii, she had majored in theatre arts and trained in lighting design at San Jose State College, and she brought the stage with her: she chose each location as a film director would a set, posed her subjects precisely, and used infrared film and special printing papers to give her black and white pictures a muted, almost misty light, which she then often coloured by hand. Her best known image is Girl With a Hat, a young woman seen from behind in a pale dress, holding a straw hat at her side. It became the benefit poster for the St. Louis Ballet, and our framed sheet is that poster, signed by her.

From the Theatre to the Camera

The fullest account of her work comes from the St. Louis Jewish Light of 27 February 1985, written when an exhibition of her photographs opened at the Julius Cohen Memorial Art Gallery of the Jewish Center for Aged in Chesterfield. It described a photographer who had moved to St. Louis three years earlier and specialised in photographing ballet dancers, clowns, models, children and ordinary people in lush settings, with an inventiveness that reminded the writer of the French painter Henri Rousseau. Anderson drew directly on her theatre training: she lit and placed her subjects as if for a scene, and she was not above putting them in strange positions, dancers on the wing of a jetliner or lying across a piece of monumental modern sculpture.

She took herself less seriously than her pictures. She told the paper she considered herself something of a comedienne, and that if people laughed at her work, so much the better.

Black and White, Then Colour

Her method combined two loves. She shot in black and white, very often on infrared film, which renders skin and fabric with a soft glow and turns foliage pale, and printed on special papers that kept the tones gentle. Then she added colour. In June and July of 1983 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch listed an exhibition of hand-painted photographs by Julie Anderson, shown with acrylic paintings by Stan Solomon at the Creative Art Studio in University City. By 1985 her prints were selling steadily for two to six hundred dollars each.

Girl With a Hat

The 1985 article called Girl With a Hat the image for which she was known internationally, and explained how: it had become the benefit poster for the St. Louis Ballet. The poster was printed in soft sepia and cream, with the photograph above a wide margin, a small printed credit line reading Girl With A Hat, silver image photograph, Julie Anderson, copyright 1983, and the words SAINT LOUIS set below in large open capitals. Our copy is signed by her by hand across the lower part of the image.

Why Anderson Matters

Anderson belongs to the generation of American photographers in the late 1970s and 1980s who pushed the black and white print back toward painting, with infrared film, toned papers and hand colouring, at the very moment colour photography was taking over. Her dancers are quiet, slightly blurred and full of air, closer to Degas than to the stage photographs of the day. Girl With a Hat is a perfect example: a performer caught not performing, waiting in an empty room with the light coming in.