There’s something hypnotic about Julie Bullard, the new book published by IDEA and created by an unlikely duo: Nadia Lee Cohen and Martin Parr. She’s the visionary behind hyper-feminine plastic pop, author of Women and HELLO My Name Is. He’s the sharp, poetic chronicler of British working-class life, with over a hundred books to his name – and, as IDEA cheekily notes, not a single Kim Kardashian video.
And yet the pairing works beautifully. In Julie Bullard, Cohen makes a dream come true: to become a character in a Martin Parr photo book. Not just to be photographed by him, but to fully inhabit her own personal idea of ’90s glamour – inspired by a real-life figure, her childhood babysitter Julie Bullard, the first woman she ever saw with naturally curly blonde hair. For her, a vision. For us, a new mythos.
In the book, Cohen is Julie. Alongside her are Scarlett Carlos Clarke as her sister Jane and Frankie Park as their mother Sharon. Every character is meticulously constructed – prosthetic noses, vintage hairstyles, homey props, and carefully styled meals. The photography is unmistakably Parr’s: direct flash, saturated color, ordinary domestic backdrops. But this time, everything is staged. Fake yet familiar. Like flipping through a family album found on eBay – which, in fact, inspired the book’s physical form, complete with puffy faux-leather cover and gold metal spiral binding.
Julie Bullard is the portrait of a life that never existed, yet somehow feels remembered. The 101 images unfold like a silent soap opera: one glance, one gesture, one birthday party or barbecue at a time. You read into the relationships without needing a caption. Julie is at the center of it all – framed, adored, and slightly haunted.
If HELLO My Name Is was an ode to Nadia’s talent for character shapeshifting, here the artifice dissolves into Parr’s documentary eye. The result is a shared hallucination, a collective memory of an England we may never have lived in, but still deeply recognize – somewhere between nostalgia and invention.
The book will be released in a limited edition of 2,500 numbered copies and launched at Dover Street Market during Photo London. For the occasion, Cohen is creating a life-sized sculpture of Parr photographing her in an open casket. A surreal and self-referential gesture, as morbid as it is absurd – and quintessentially Nadia.
With Julie Bullard, photographic fiction reaches a new level of depth and precision. It’s a collaboration that works precisely because it shouldn’t. And yet, like every good dream, it feels more real than reality itself.
