Jamie Baldridge

Jamie Baldridge was born in 1975 and raised in a small-town Catholic environment in Louisiana. Baldridge explains that he decided to become an artist when he was a child, after finding an old fairytale book entitled, “101 Fairy Tales” in his grandmother’s attic sparking his ongoing fascination with fairytales and fables. He first studied Theology and Creative Writing, and then Photography at Louisiana State University where he received his BFA in 2001 and his MFA in 2005. Working with large-format, medium-format, and high-res digital cameras, Baldridge photographs individuals in surreal and fantastical compositions in order to reinterpret tales and fables. His protagonists, who are typically female, frequently appear in timeworn interior spaces. He takes his photographs and manipulates them digitally in order to express his own interpretation of these aged stories. His pictures are visual puzzles that visualize metaphors and existential situations. He is a photographer who plumbs the earth for answers about its basic construction and how things work.

Baldridge is currently a professor of Photography at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Spain, and the Netherlands. His work and writings can be found in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Rare Books Collection of the Library of Congress, Cornell University, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, The University of Notre Dame, as well as esteemed private collections. He lives and continues to practice in Lafayette, Louisiana.