Biography

Julia Calfee

American-born multi-media artist, photographer, writer and animator Julia Calfee has spent most of her professional life living and working in Europe and Asia. She is fluent in French. She majored in journalism at NYU and studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. Her first book, Photogeneses, a large format de luxe limited edition, prefaced by spanish master Antonio SAURA and writer Jose Carlos LLOP was published by the Joan Miro Foundation in 1995...

From 1996 to 2002, she focused on Mongolia, where she led a caravan to bring medicine to remote areas. During this time she also documented life in Mongolian prisons for a relief organization, and photographed the blight of poverty in Ulan Bator. Over these years she also took pictures of traditional reindeer herders in the north, particularly one female shaman. The experiences with the shaman were published in a limited-edition catalogue called Mountains Spirits of Mongolia, published by the Richard Liu. Foundation and simultanously an exhibition on that theme was held in Brussels for the grand opening of the newly renovated Art Deco landmark The Flagey Art Center. In 2003, Spirits and Ghosts: Journeys Through Mongolia was published by PowerHouse, New York. This book explores the transitions and changes in Mongolia since 1996, touching upon the obstinate ritual and beliefs of this country still steeped in the murkiness of the post-Communist era, and awkwardly adapting to a new democratic system. A series of exhibitions followed these publications in New York, London, Paris, Milan and Brussels.

She then began to photograph what she refers to as the New China, which has included documenting the private lives of a new class of people who are suddenly extremely wealthy as well as the urban-scapes that have arisen with the overall economic changes of recent years. She has also documented the new contemporary art scene in Beijing, principally the 798 Factory, and has spent time in the northwest and southwest of China, where Central Asian influence still dominates despite the march of Chinese influence ever westward. This body of work has appeared in many influential magasines and newspapers like Time, Figaro Magazine, Paris_Match , Corriere della Sera ,etc.... She was the first photographer to document the life style of these new billionaires in China. Some of this work has been published by National Geograhic in 2008 iunder the title: INSIDE CHINA. In some remote areas of that immense country she also found evidence of a never-changing China, where some groups of people hold on to ways of life seemingly unaltered since 1,000 years ago like for instance in the far western moslem provinces contiguous to Afghanistan. She is conversant in Mongolian and has cultivated a large network of contacts in Asia and Europe, from shepherds to CEOs.

From 2003 until 2008, when not in Brussels or Beijing, Julia Calfee has been living mainly in New York City's Hotel Chelsea, where she documented the state of mind that has existed in that unique place until the BARD family which had run this place since the 1940's was removed from management in June 2007. This long term project, now finished, has become a well acclaimed book published by powerHouse Books in 2008: "INSIDE, The Chelsea Hotel photographed by Julia Calfee." and a large exhibition of this work opened in December 2009 is currently on view at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in PRAGUE. Attendance has been such that the show has been extended until March 15th 2010. This show is connected to CHELSEA HOTEL, Ghosts of Bohemia, an exhibition featuring some of the works of famous past residents of this mythic place like Andy WARHOL and Robert MAPPLETHORPE.

Calfee's work has appeared in publications worldwide, including the New York Times, Time, Business Week, London Sunday Times, Paris Match, Guardian, Elle Italia, Elle Japan , Marie Claire, Paris Photo, Digital Photography, Corriere della Sera, and Photo Eight. She is represented by Polaris Images.

The New York Chapter of the Explorers Club elected Julia Calfee as a fellow member on 14 June 2008 acknowledging many years of her work in Central Asia, from the Gobi desert to Siberia, on the Silk Road, in the Altai mountains and on the never before documented prehistoric megalithes of Mongolia. The club, dedicated to the advancement of field research and education in the physical, natural and biological sciences, is known for such world famous members as Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mt Everest, and Thor Heyerdahl, the Kon-Tiki expedition leader and navigator as well as the first man on the North pole, the South pole, and many others.

New project: "THE LAST SONGS OF THE GLACIERS". Her on going new project, started in 2007, is on climatic change due to global warming, which she is broaching with an experimental, multidimensional and multi-media approach. As a whole it is named THE LAST SONGS OF THE GLACIERS.

Starting on the 12th of May 2010 and lasting till June 23rd 2010 The installation: "THE CHAPEL WHICH SINGS GLACIER SONGS" in the medieval city of Rheinfelden on the Rhine river in Switzerland is part of Julia Calfee's larger project entitled "The Last Songs of the Glaciers". This project approaches the vast issue of global warming in intimate and artistic manner, with already more than 200 recordings of the sounds of ice and glaciers melting away, as well as over two years of close-up photography in the high Alpine valleys and mountains of Switzerland around Vals and Länta in Graubünden. In this complex installation Images and sounds from the melting glaciers will be combined to be projected inside and outside the gothic structure of the chapel located on the bank of the Rhine. Black & white photos from these series have already been shown at Parisfoto 2009, they will also be part of a show at the Robert MORAT gallery in Hamburg, Germany, from March 5th till May 6th 2010.