Born Julian Standish Backus on September 3, 1944, into a prominent Detroit family, Backus was quick to become a refugee from his class (upper) and his schooling (crusty). As a teenager in the late 1950s, he actively embraced the Beats. Bypassing college in 1962, Backus bounced around Europe for two years, preferring motion to moss, Bohemia to suburbia, and Holy Barbarians to Men in Gray Flannel Suits, preferences he retained to his dying day.

In 1964, he attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, plunging into photography, avant garde art, and anti-war activity. By 1967 he had renounced his student deferment and burned his draft card with enough panache to end up in the Detroit papers. The subsequent struggle with his draft board propelled him into two years of service in Puerto Rico as a conscientious objector.

Upon his return to the U.S., Backus joined a small West Coast band of video pioneers who were experimenting with the newly developed Portapac video camera. Exploiting the revolutionary technology's light weight and mobility, Backus and his cohorts created independent works that challenged the values and aesthetic of American mass market television. In 1970, he co-founded Optic Nerve, a video and photography collective in San Francisco. In 1972, he became an active member of the Bay area Video Coalition.

For the next two decades, his face was rarely seen without a camera lens protruding from it. Shuttling between coasts, he worked primarily as a director of photography, but also as a producer, editor, and still photographer, aiding and abetting the work of numerous video artists and mediamakers, including Chip Lord, Doug Hall, Skip Blumberg, Branda Miller, Antonio Muntadas, Joan Jonas, and Kathy High. Backus brought his own style and stance to everything he shot, from severe weather in the Bering Sea [Storm and Stress], to miniaturized dads caught in traps [Every Saturday Dad Played Golf]. Throughout his career, Backus remained an unusually collaborative artist. By the mid-1980s, however, the collective spirit that had sustained him was mostly gone from the art world, replaced by a culture of marketing and self-promotion. In 1993, having focused anew on still photography, Backus discovered the stencil art of Paris. (For the last four years of his life he photographed pochoirs, evoking the dissident, the ecstatic, and the collaborative aspects of art.

He died on November 21, 1996, in New York City, of heart failure.

Pierce Rafferty + Lynn Phillips