Julie Buck - Life

Life

Buck studied at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. After graduating, she became the manager for the Harvard Film Archive at Harvard University. While sorting and preserving films in the Archive's collection, she and her friend and co-archivist Karin Segal became interested in the images of women (known as "China girls") which often appear on the leaders of older films. Buck and Segal began the long process of digitally cleaning, restoring and printing these enigmatic images for an art exhibit titled "Girls On Film," a visual tribute to the many anonymous women who worked in the film industry.

At the same time, Buck began to experiment with collage. Her first large-format collage, Black-Haired Girl: Karin, depicted Segal, with a challenging stare, raising a glass of orange juice at the viewer. Buck has created three collage series to date—"Black-Haired Girls," "Heads" and "Blank Slate"—and has also completed two commissioned works. In college, Buck received a 1950 Rolleiflex camera that had been owned by her great-grandfather and began using it to take pictures. "Self-Centered," a series of black-and-white photographs of herself wearing various articles of clothing in deliberately staged surroundings, was the result. Recently, after a number of years away from school, Buck decided to pursue her interests in narrative filmmaking. She graduated from Columbia University's film school in 2011 with an emphasis in film production.