Jamie Diamond is a Brooklyn-based photographer, performance artist, sculptor, and film and video maker. In one series, she re-creates images of a mother embracing her baby, found in a German photo album from 1938, and blends her re-enactment and the original images together. Another involves collaborating with owners of life-size dolls of babies. They pose as 'parents' in domestic settings. She has also photographed 'families' constructed out of groups of unrelated strangers.
Read MoreDiamond gained an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and a BA from the University of Wisconsin in 2005.
Influenced by the Pictures Generation artists of the late 1970s who reconstructed images from mass media—'appropriation' photographers like Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine—she became conscious of the writings on representation by theorist Douglas Crimp.
Carefully composed, Jamie Diamond's photographs tend to undermine initial viewer assumptions, often through her structures being revealed over time through tableaux performances and documentary videos. As she puts it: ' Through collaborations with strangers, mimes, professional actors, and untrained outsider artists, I use recognizable photographic language to make objects, construct events, and forge artificial histories and relationships for the camera, exploring the inherent fictions and complex perspectives of photography, and the conflation between the documentary and constructed tableaux genres.'
In the 'Forever Mothers' series (2012), Diamond collaborates with women who collect life-size dolls of children. For a variety of reasons—they or their partner might be infertile—they own silicone 'surrogates'. They, and sometimes their partner, pose with these clothed replicas, which viewers must look at closely to discern their artificiality. The images raise a whole host of issues about needs, fetishism, parental love, family structures, and so on. For this project, the artist joined The Reborners, a group of self-taught women artists who make their own dolls.
For 'Constructed Family Portraits' (2014), the artist sorts people she has never met before into 'family' groups and positions them in a public space, like a park. The 15-minute videos shown with the final photographs confirm that the strangers are indeed that. They capture the shyness and awkwardness of first meetings.
'365: 1938/2017' merges photos from a found photo album from 1938 with recreated family images through double exposure, a ghostly union. Diamond discovered the old book of pre-war black-and-white maternal photographs in Berlin, and used it to insert images of herself and a child on top of the original images.
Diamond has completed residencies at the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art and Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs (both 2016), and has participated in the Mana Residency (2014) and the LMCC Swing Space residency (2013 and 2008–2009). She is the recipient of the NYFA Fellowship Award in Photography (2013) and the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Award (2008).
Jamie Diamond has participated in many solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Someone Else: The Foreignness of Children, Museum für neue Kunst, Freiburg (2022); 365:1938/2017, KEWENIG, Berlin (2021); Dolls' House, Prada Mode, Hong Kong (2019); Surrogate: A Love Ideal, Milan Osservatorio, Fondazione Prada (2019); Blueprints, Spectral Lines, New York (2019); Nine Months of Reborning, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago (2015).
Group exhibitions include Member Works: Photography, Mana Contemporary, Jersey City (2020); Blueprints, Spectral Lines, New York (2019); Bodies of Work, Baxter Street, New York (2019); Are You My Mother?, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea della Sicilia, Sicily (2019); Flat Out: Drawings, 2000–2019, Mana Contemporary, Jersey City (2019); PLAYTIME Friederike Reveman // Jamie Diamond, Galerie Frank Pages, Geneva (2014); Mana Exposition, Mana Contemporary, Jersey City (2014).
Jamie Diamond's website can be found here, and her Instagram here.
John Hurrell | Ocula | 2022
