Charcoal Book Club – June 2020
About the Book: Girl Pictures by Justine Kurland
Justine Kurland started making the work that would become Girl Pictures while in an MFA program at Yale. Her boyfriend at the time had a fifteen year old daughter named Alyssum who had been sent home for rebellious behaviour. Kurland immediately bonded with her over their mutual interest in running away. “"I was [experiencing] nostalgia, realizing that I was no longer where she was," Kurland says in a recent interview. "It was this way that we could connect." Kurland would dress her up in runaway clothes and together they would stage images around the narrative of running away. The practice quickly evolved to include subjects and landscapes in the northeast, and not before long Kurland bought a van and began driving west.
A journey across the American landscape has long been mythologized by criss crossing poets, cowboys, artists, and rebels. For Kurland it was writers like Kerouac and photographers like Robert Frank who opened up the road. While making Girl Pictures she channeled the punk rock spirit she had first found in girl bands like The Runaways and in literary characters like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield.
Between 1997 and 2002, Kurland traveled the country loosely guided by 19th century frontier landmarks. She would find girls willing to participate in her photographs around the local towns and schools she had driven to in her van. "It's difficult to describe the joy of a carload of girls going somewhere with the radio turned up and the windows rolled down," she writes. Working with a 4x5 camera Kurland collaborated with her subjects much the way she did with Alyssum. “Behind the camera, I was also somehow in front of it—one of them, a girl made strong by other girls.” In the resulting images, teenage girls roam wild in the landscape, camp out in the woods, roast pigs on a spit, lounge in the shade of an overpass, and get tangled up in the backseat of burned out cars.
In the staged photographs of Girl Pictures, Kurland walks the line between the lawless and utopian, reality and fiction, intimacy and rebellion. “My runaways built forts in idyllic forests and lived communally in a perpetual state of youthful bliss,” she writes towards the end of the book. “Revisiting these photographs now, twenty years later, I am confronted by a standing army of teenage runaway girls, deployed across the American landscape, at a time when they need each other more than ever. ‘So what,’ they say, ‘we’re never coming back.’”
Book Details
Signed first edition
8 7/8 x 11 in.
144 pages
76 four-color images
Hardcover
VISIT CHARCOAL BOOK CLUB to sign up and purchase books