Justine Kurland is an American fine art photographer that first gained public notice with her work in Another Girl, Another Planet (1999). The show included her large c-print staged tableau pictures of neo-romantic landscapes inhabited by young adolescent girls. She also produced a series of images called ‘runaways’ inspired by her past experience with being a runaway when she was young which influenced her to find other young people in a similar situation and recruit them as models. In total, Kurland published 69 pictures of girls in her series “Girl Pictures.” The staged photos take place in urban and wilderness settings, with girls depicted as runaways, and show how they are hopeful and independent. Kurland has acknowledged the parallels she created in her work, specifically her competing desires to both escape and fight back; to document and allegorize; and to capture “vaporous abstractions” like the carefree freedom of her “runaway girls.”

She also published a book titled ‘SPIRIT WEST’ that is described as being neither reportage nor fantasy: rather a kind of disturbed normality. The beauty of the nature is overwhelming, but is regularly disturbed by an ugly viaduct or unsightly building.

“particular appeal of Ms. Kurland’s work is in its deadpan tension between the matter of fact and the mythic.” – Ken Johnson

Image analysis:

-Broadway (Joy) 2001

In Broadway (Joy) (2001), the camera is angled down on two girls as they dance on a desert road. The surrounding environment seems vast and endless with the only indication of society is the dusty road and the phonelines that stretch across the desolate landscape. Although they are surrounded by a barren and unpopulated area, which in comparison to they seem small, their energy fills the frame. One of the girls, on the right, is in mid air with her arms waving around, her blurred arms becoming like wings representing her found sense freedom. To create this effect, Kurland will have used a slower shutter-speed to capture that sense of that movement and create an accurate response of the emotions they are showing through their dancing. Despite their faces being unclear, we can tell that they are happy as their body language displays this and overall this image perpetuates joy.