Justine Kurland

After studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Kurland pursued graduate study in photography at Yale University. In the United States during the 1990s, staged photography increasingly absorbed narrative structures from cinema and literature, while landscape photography was being reconsidered through gender, class, and national mythology. Kurland developed a method that combined the descriptive precision of a large-format camera with constructed scenes, bringing real girls and an imagined community into the same frame.^*1

From a Single Portrait to the Community of Girl Pictures

The immediate catalyst for Girl Pictures was a summer Kurland spent with Alyssum, the daughter of her partner at the time. She has recalled combining nostalgia for her own lost childhood with the feelings of a girl who wanted to run away from home, and inventing a runaway story together.^*1 She later made scenes with girls she met while traveling, using photography to give an imagined community the appearance of belonging to the existing world. As Kurland has said, photography could bring another way of living closer to the truth; the medium’s claim on reality allowed a utopia to exist temporarily.^{*1 *2}

Reading Road Photography and the Frontier Myth through Groups of Girls

American road photography has often treated the individual who leaves the city by car and passes through unknown territory as an emblem of freedom. Girl Pictures places girls in groups in forests, suburbs, and roadside spaces, making mobility a matter of creating safety and place together rather than a solitary journey of self-discovery. Aperture describes the series as a feminist reconstruction of stories of running away, adventure, and the myth of the American West.^*3

Girl Pictures: Group Composition, Freedom, and Risk

Even when one girl returns the camera’s gaze, others continue separate actions around her. Kurland disperses several bodies across foreground, distance, and the edges of the frame instead of fixing a single protagonist at the center. The viewer cannot reduce the scene to the psychology of one figure. A review in 4Columns reads the series as a dreamlike landscape of girlhood while drawing attention to the tension created by these group arrangements.^*4

Forests and bodies of water can appear as refuges from urban supervision, yet they also carry associations with disappearance and violence against girls. Kurland leaves gestures of freedom and unsettling gaps within the same composition. A LensCulture review presents the series as a transfer of classic American narratives of escape and freedom to young women.^*5 The homes to which the girls return, the age difference between photographer and participant, and the fact that the community dissolves after the shoot introduce friction into the utopian image. Kurland’s later description of approaching real community through imagination likewise points to a process that must be remade each time, not to a completed ideal society.^*6

When Girl Pictures was republished in the 2020s, Kurland publicly reconsidered the power differences involved in photographing minors, the models’ self-determination, and the photographer’s own desire. In an essay for Frieze, she included pictures in which the girls held the camera and photographed her in return, challenging a one-directional account of authorship.^*7 This self-critique prevents the early series from ending with an image of liberated girls in the 1990s; it brings differences of age and the power to photograph into the work’s subsequent history.

Using the Large-Format Camera as Time for Collaboration

Girl Pictures can resemble spontaneous photographs of girls encountered by chance, but many scenes were constructed after Kurland scouted locations and discussed actions and arrangements with the participants. Aperture brings together sixty-nine works made from 1997 to 2002 as a series in which real girls intersect with utopian fiction.^*3 Setting up and focusing a large-format camera takes time, and that interval allowed the girls to adjust their positions and activities with one another. The detailed negative gives the imagined scene physical credibility, while the discussion before exposure becomes a meeting point between the photographer’s scenario and the participants’ improvisation.

Girl Pictures, 1997–2002

Aperture’s photobook reconstructs the series made between 1997 and 2002 as a whole, including previously unpublished works.^*3 The precision of the large-format camera records weeds, clothes, sky, and roadside infrastructure with the same density as the girls’ faces, keeping the figures embedded in the landscape. The book can make one community appear to move across the country, although editing connects different girls photographed in different places. The sequence of the photobook, as much as the individual encounter, creates the narrative of the series. ^*2

Highway Kind (2006–2015) and This Train (2006–2010): Traveling as Mother and Son, and the History of the Railroad

In Highway Kind (2006–2015), the road trip changes from a girl’s escape into the time of a mother living in a car with her young son. Children’s belongings accumulate inside the vehicle, while campsites, repair shops, and roadside communities become points where travel pauses. The artist’s official project page describes a long-term series about travelers encountered after the 2007 financial crisis and about a life shaped by car culture, maintenance, and breakdown.^*8 The road remains a figure of release, but it also becomes a place where meals, sleep, safety, and the upkeep of the vehicle must be managed.

This Train (2006–2010), part of Highway Kind, began with her son’s intense interest in trains. Kurland set up a 4 × 5 camera beside railroad tracks, sometimes waiting all day for a train, and photographed tunnels through mountains, bridges, freight cars, and the domestic life of mother and child in the car. Her official project page connects the railroad to the seizure of Indigenous land during westward expansion, Asian immigrant labor, and the environmental burden extending from the age of steam, while also describing the work as a family album made by a queer single mother and her son.^*9 A child’s unconditional love of trains stands beside the histories of violence built into the landscape, reconsidering the infrastructure that makes mobility possible through family experience.

SCUMB Manifesto: Ownership, Cutting, and Rebinding the Photobook

Kurland cut apart approximately 150 photobooks from her own collection, most of them by white male photographers, and recomposed their pages. The title SCUMB Manifesto refers to Valerie Solanas; its critique of the canon acts directly on paper, printing, binding, and traces of ownership.^*10 In the work held by MoMA, the cover board from the original book remains as the support, keeping the source of the severed photographic history visible.^*11 The cuts that stitch several pages into a body or landscape have been discussed as a “feminist cut” that breaks apart the authority of photobook author, editor, and owner.^*12 The collective occupation of landscape in Girl Pictures continues here as a reoccupation of the bookshelf and the printed page. ^*13

A Utopia That Exists Only during the Photograph

The community in Girl Pictures existed in reality only for the duration of the photograph. Meadows and woods can resemble Eden, but they are also suburban lots, roadside spaces, and ruins, where freedom from supervision overlaps with danger. Kurland has described utopia as the act of trying to approach it, rather than as a social model already achieved.^*1 Scenes made by different girls in different places become the journey of a single community through the ordering of the photobook. What physically existed was a brief period of production and relations among participants; the enduring community is assembled by the viewer who reads the sequence.

Adding Groups, Care, and the Time of Stopping to Road Photography

Kurland’s historical position emerges across the groups of girls in Girl Pictures, the mother and child in Highway Kind, and the family album and railroad history of This Train. Together, these works make it impossible to describe American mobility solely through the self-discovery of a solitary man. Communal life, childcare, waiting, mechanical failure, Indigenous land, and memories of immigrant labor enter the forward movement of roads and tracks.^*8*9 Freedom in the landscape becomes inseparable from caring for another person, maintaining a vehicle, and carrying histories of violence.

How SCUMB Manifesto Returns a Critique to the Early Work

Where Girl Pictures gives groups of girls the central role in a male-dominated mythology of travel, SCUMB Manifesto intervenes directly in the ownership and editing of the photobooks that sustained that mythology. An interview in The Guardian recounts Kurland’s decision to cut apart approximately 150 books and her dissatisfaction with the photographic canon.^*14 The site of critique shifts from staging a world for the sitter to remaking the materials, editing, and circulation through which photographic history is produced.

An exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum and an Aperture interview with Kurland reconsider Girl Pictures as a site where photographer and participants temporarily made a community, beyond the fantasy of girls running away.^*16*20 Publication material for Highway Kind, exhibition material for This Train, and interviews with Kurland show how traveling with her son connects the freedom of the road to railroad construction, dispossession of land, immigrant labor, and the daily life of a family.^*15*18*24

An ICP conversation and the exhibition The Rose present the re-editing of earlier photographs as a way to reconsider who occupies the position of viewer and whose body has served as material for photographic history, rather than as a repudiation of the early work.^*19*21*22 Collection records at the National Gallery of Art and the Whitney Museum document the entry of individual works from Girl Pictures into museum collections and the series’ reception as a defining body of late-1990s American photography.^*17*23