Justine Kurland is a contemporary American photographer. Best known for her large-scale C-prints of rural landscapes inhabited by nude women, Kurland’s surreal images evoke pagan utopias or post-apocalyptic or pre-industrial worlds.
Examples of her work:
Girl Pictures
One of Justine Kurland’s most successful projects, maybe even the most successful and well-known is Girl Pictures. Presented as a photobook, this is my biggest inspiration for my personal study project.
‘Every teenager is a teenager pretending to be a teenager.’
I was fascinated by this project of hers because she has a variety of different themed images. They all have the overall theme of like girls having freedom, doing what they want; however, she has created different photoshoots.
For example, these are some examples of images of Kurland’s that are more rural, featuring settings like the countryside, fields, streams, swamps, nature and day-time settings:
Whereas, on the other hand, there’s also images of hers that are based in more urban settings. They have the same theme and story to them but the environment is the city, residential areas and night-time settings:
The variety in her images depicts the story of runaway teenagers, and how they can find freedom in deserted countryside’s but also being almost lost in a big city.
I aim to create this kind of variety in my own work, with different planned and candid photoshoots.
“The girls were rebelling. The girls were acting out. The girls had run away from home, that wad much clear.”
Justine Kurland’s take on the classic American tale of the runaway takes us on a wild ride of freedom, memorializing the fleeting moments of adolescence and its fearless protagonists. The girls in their baggy jeans and bare feet. The girls in their leather boots and used sweaters. There’s something about them that feels like so many teenage girls and I want my photographs to mirror this feeling of empathy for my viewers.
The story behind ‘Girl pictures’
Justine Kurland created this book based on her own childhood experiences, her images almost foreshadow herself. She channelled angry energy of girl bands into her photographs of teenagers ( This vibe of photographs represents girlhood in a different way).
The first girl Kurland photographed was the daughter (age 15) of the guy she was dating at the time. She preferred her company to his. After he left for work in the mornings, they concieved a plan to shoot film stills starring the girl as a teenage runaway. The only surviving picture from the time shows her in a cherry tree by the westside highway:
She hovers pinkly between the river and the highway, two modes of travel that share a single vanishing point.
Kurland pursued this idea of teenage runaways and continued to develop her project using college freshman’s and teenagers from various high schools. she said ‘looking back, it seemed miraculous that so many of them were prepared to get into a strangers car and be driven off to an out of the way location. But then, being a teenage girl is nothing without the willingness and ability to posture as the teenage girl.’
I intend for my images to create this kind of aura.