JT Blatty: Happy Dogs

JT Blatty: Happy Dogs by Aline SmithsonMay 8, 2015

Aquatic Conversations ©JT Blatty

The best part of owning a dog is that they become our teachers and us, their students. The exuberant greeting after a few hours apart, the enthusiastic consumption of anything not locked down, and the joy of wide open spaces remind us to find happiness in small things. Photographer JT Blatty has captured the exuberance of night landscapes illuminated by the moving lights of happy, playing dogs, showing us the wonderment of of life off leash.

Happy Dogs is on exhibition at the Martine Chaisson Gallery in New Orleans through May 30 2015, while selections from her first solo exhibition, Parallel, are also on exhibition at the Downtown Aloft New Orleans through August 2015.

Trailblazer ©JT Blatty

JT graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2000 and served six years as an active duty Army Officer, which included first rotation combat deployments into Afghanistan and Iraq. Inspired by a love of capturing life, people, and her personal experiences with disposable cameras, notebooks and pens, and after completing her service to the military, she pursued photography and writing. She resides in New Orleans, LA, where, in addition to working as a freelance photographer, she is also a FEMA Disaster Reservist photographer. Her long-term photo documentary project Fish Town: Louisiana’s Vanishing Fishing Communities was a 2013 Critical Mass finalist, a finalist for the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography, and for the Clarence John Laughlin Award. It is also a forthcoming title under George F. Thompson Publishing, expected for publication in spring 2016.

Most recently, Blatty’s work has been exhibited at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Multimedia Moscow House of Photography, and the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography, while her most recent publications include CNN Photos, the Oxford American, and Newsweek/The Daily Beast. In between photography projects and commissions, she has been writing a book about her experiences in the military during a time of combat, and the challenges and adaptations she faced as a young adult graduating from West Point a year before 9-11.

Wild Things ©JT Blatty

Watching my dog, Cuba, and his friends run wild and free has always been my happy place. I have this admiration for their uninhibited freedom, their inner wildness, and mostly, their unwavering love for life and living. Happy Dogs is my breakaway back into the simple, as a human and as an artist; I provide my life’s landscapes, and the dogs electrify them with light, painting an expression of the uninhibited freedom deep within all of us.