J. T. Blatty

Jennifer Tuero Blatty was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1978,^[1] to tennis player and paleoanthropologist Linda Tuero and author and filmmaker William Peter Blatty.^[2] Each parent married several times, and she has multiple half-siblings; full brother Billy Blatty became a restaurateur and entrepreneur.^[3] In 1996 she graduated from St. Martin's Episcopal School, which her mother had also attended.^[4]

Blatty attended the United States Military Academy at West Point from 1996 to 2000. While there, she was a standout athlete in women's tennis. She was part of the Patriot League all-star tennis singles team each of her four years, and doubles in 1997.^[5] She amassed a record 27 career wins at number 1 ranked women's tennis singles.^[6] She was a captain of the women's tennis team in the 1999–2000 school year,^[7] and her team, the Army Black Knights, won the League title in both 1999 and 2000.^[5] She also won the most valuable player of the Patriot League.^[8] After graduation, she was listed in the Patriot League's All-Decade and 25th Anniversary women's tennis teams.^[9][5]

Blatty was also the first female boxer at West Point.^[8]

After graduation, Blatty served as a platoon leader in the 92nd Engineer Battalion.^[10] She was among the first troops deployed into the 2002 United States invasion of Afghanistan, and afterwards in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.^[8] By 2005 she was a captain, and rear detachment commander for the 92nd.^[11] She served a total of six years in the United States Army.^[10]

As an amateur photographer before military service, she continued to create scrapbooks of her deployments.^[10] It was in Afghanistan that she says that she became drawn to capturing the world around her; she tried to turn her story and photographs into a book, and wrote 30,000 words before pausing.^[12][13] Blatty had been stationed at Fort Stewart during her army career, and stayed in Savannah, Georgia afterwards, coaching tennis and doing freelance photography and writing.^[14][12] She credits Zig Jackson, documentary photographer and professor at Savannah College of Art & Design, who attended her first exhibition in 2006, for urging her to hone her craft by learning the darkroom, and taking a 2009 internship with National Geographic Traveler.^[12][15] In 2010, she published Who Dat Nation, a book of photographs documenting the euphoria after the New Orleans Saints football team winning Super Bowl XLIV, some of which were also published in the Traveler.^[16][17]

Starting in 2011, Blatty took courses at the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies (CDS), getting a certificate in 2013.^[12] After her CDS courses, she also became a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Disaster Reservist Photographer.^[12]

• Selected FEMA photographs by J. T. Blatty
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  Piles of debris line the side of the roads in flood affected areas one week after the 2016 severe flooding in Baton Rouge
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  A crumbled section of LA 10 near Clinton, Louisiana, one month after 2016 flooding
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  A farmer describes the loss of his crops, Sept 13, 2016
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  Remains of a neighborhood destroyed by Hurricane Irma Sept. 20, 2017
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  Remains of a car on the side of Overseas Highway, following Irma, Oct. 10, 2017

Blatty made several fine art photography exhibitions at the Martine Chaisson gallery in New Orleans. "Parallel" was a 2012 exhibit of fossils displayed on nudes.^[18] "Happy Dogs" was a 2015 exhibit of motion blur photographs of colorful light traces left by active dogs at night;^[19] 10% of its profits went to dog rescue missions.^[20]

In September 2018, Blatty published Fish Town: Down the Road to Louisiana's Fishing Communities (George F. Thompson Publishing, ISBN 9781938086519). It was a 200-page book with 137 color photographs taken over six years, mostly in St. Bernard, Tangipahoa and Plaquemines parishes, with recollections from the people of the coastal communities sustained by fishing.^[12][21][22] Its release was accompanied by an exhibition of the photographs in the book at the Martine Chaisson gallery.^[23] Blatty had written a story about the collapse of regional fisheries for Connect Savannah magazine in 2008, but went back to her home state for this long-term project.^[12]

After finishing Fish Town in 2018, Blatty spent a month as an embedded journalist among the volunteer Ukrainian soldiers of the war in Donbas.^[24][25] Her photos and recorded oral histories became an exhibition titled "Frontline / Peace Life: Ukraine’s Revolutionaries of the Forgotten War", which was presented at the Ukrainian National Museum in Chicago in May 2019, and the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City in 2020.^[26] Dmytro Lavrenchuk and Alina Viatina, Ukrainian veterans from the photos, accompanied Blatty to the exhibitions to tell their stories in person.^[27] The exhibit was a finalist for the 2019 Lange-Taylor Prize for documentary photography.^[28]

Blatty returned to photograph Ukraine veterans regularly over the next years, including with West Point classmate and veteran activist Dylan Tete and former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Bob McDonald.^[29][30] In November 2020, Blatty received the 2020-21 Fulbright Program U.S. Scholar Award to Ukraine, which she used to continue documenting Ukraine's volunteer soldiers, the latest project to be called "Transition Within Conflict and Across Borders".^[8][31] In November 2021, she appeared on the third season of Ukrainian reality television program Крутий Заміс, about veterans starting businesses.^[32]

Blatty's book Snapshots Sent Home: From Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine - A Memoir was published by Elva Resa Publishing on February 20, 2024.^[33] It included photographs and memoirs of the war veterans of three conflicts, including stories of her own experience from the first two, while especially focusing on Ukraine, where she only carried a camera.^[34][35]

• Official website