Jamie Baldridge
Jamie Baldridge (born May 24, 1975) is an American photographer and arts educator. He creates highly manipulated and surreal tableau vivant photographs. He is currently a professor of Photography in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Life and work. Jamie Baldridge was born and raised in New Iberia, Louisiana on May 24, 1975. He was raised in a conservative, Catholic household. He went on to study at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge where he received both his Bachelor of Fine Arts and later his Master of Fine Arts degree. He is known  for creating highly manipulated surreal tableau vivant photography. Baldridge's work references many literary, philosophical, religious, and artistic themes such as the symbolism and psychology of dream imagery, the frangibility of relationships, altered states of consciousness, Jungian archetypes, and esoteric tales and fables. "He has filtered those loaded fables through his subconscious, tempered them with dystopia, tasty fetishes and research gleaned from the musty stacks of Latin scholarship, and emerged with (a) painterly surrealistic vision." He cites Leonora Carrington, Søren Kierkegaard, Joseph Campbell, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Remedios Varo, Edward Gorey, and the "Epic of Gilgamesh" as but a few  of his varied inspirations. His subjects, usually female (because he is trying to lose his virginity), often have their faces and/or heads obscured allowing the viewer greater opportunity for symbolic interpretations of identity and challenging accepted preconceptions about the genre of portraiture. Baldridge's works are often accompanied by narratives written in a very purple and baroque prose which serve to describe the point of peripety represented in the image itself. He was named by Oxford American magazine in 2012, one of the new "100 superstars of Southern art".