“The girls were rebelling. The girls were acting out. The girls had run away from home, that much was clear. They were trying on a version of themselves that the world had thus far shown them was “boy.” . . . Cowboys, sailors, pirates, hitchhikers, hobos, train hoppers, explorers, catchers in the rye, lords of the flies—you name it, all the dominion of boys. If you wanted a place in the narrative, you had to imagine yourself inside of it.”—Rebecca Bengal
The North American frontier is an enduring symbol of romance, rebellion, escape, and freedom. At the same time, it’s a profoundly masculine myth—cowboys, outlaws, Beat poets. Photographer Justine Kurland reclaimed this space in her now-iconic series of images of teenage girls, taken between 1997 and 2002 on the road in the American wilderness. “I staged the girls as a standing army of teenaged runaways in resistance to patriarchal ideals,” says Kurland. She portrays the girls as fearless and free, tender and fierce. They hunt and explore, braid each other’s hair, and swim in a sun-dappled watering hole— paying no mind to the camera (or the viewer). Their world is at once lawless and utopian, a frontier Eden in the wild spaces just outside of suburban infrastructure and ideas. Twenty years on, the series still resonates, published here in its entirety and including newly discovered, unpublished images.
Justine Kurland (born in Warsaw, New York, 1969) received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Yale University. Her work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and International Center of Photography, New York, among other institutions. Her monograph Highway Kind was published by Aperture in 2016.
Rebecca Bengal writes short stories, essays, and long-form narrative, frequently about photography. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, Bookforum, Paris Review, Vogue, and the New York Times, among others. She is the Spring 2020 Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
Book Details
Justine Kurland : Girl Pictures is published by Aperture
Photographs and text by Justine Kurland; Story by Rebecca Bengal
8 7/8 x 11 in. (22.6 x 28 cm)
144 pages
76 four-color images Hardcover
ISBN 978-1-59711-474-5
US $50.00 / CDN $65.00 / UK £40.00
Publishing date : May 2020
https://aperture.org/shop/justine-kurland-girl-pictures
