How have Julia Margaret Cameron and Justine Kurland explored what it means to be feminine in their work.
Femininity is represented in several different ways – what it means to be feminine reflecting on how it’s changed from the past to the modern day. People have different perspectives and ideas on what femininity is and it can be represented and shown through photography, this can be seen very apparent now as there are increasingly different ideas on gender and how it is embraced. In my essay I will be exploring the way both artists Julia Margaret Cameron and Justine Kurland represent femininity through their work whilst also using Claire Marie Healy’s book girlhood as my main reference when exploring the ideas of femininity and specifically how images can depict deeper meanings. I’ve chosen these two artists as Cameron was the first artist to use the new medium of photography to explore femininity in the 19th century. She upheld some aspects of the traditional Victorian woman, such as the ideal of motherhood, in most ways her photographic characters transcended Victorian gender views by defying convention and asserting their independence. Justine Kurland juxtaposes this as her work is seen as more contemporary and more relatable when referring to femininity. Kurland’s book Girl Pictures, involves photographs which were taken 20 years ago, and depict unruly teenagers in the equally wild landscapes of America. It is interesting how both Kurland and Cameron’s photography are almost binary opposite styles however were delving into the same theme and ideas, that is why I’ve chosen to study and compare their work. I think it’s important to explore how ideologies have changed around this topic and most importantly how a camera can capture and document a story around a topic. I will be responding to this research by making my own images using the same narrative/ theme, femininity, exploring what girls my age and specifically in Jersey, a small, limited island, has to offer for young people.
Julia Margaret Camerons work links heavily with pictorialism, from the 1880s and onwards photographers strived for photography to be art by trying to make pictures that resembled as paintings. There are several different photographic techniques that can be used by pictorialist to make their images appear to be art such as manipulating images in a dark room, scratching and marking their prints to imitate the texture of the canvas, using soft focus, blurred and fuzzy imagery based of allegorical and spiritual subject matter, including religious scenes. Cameron was highly influenced by pictorialism however around her time, before 1850 photography was practiced by a few amateurs and portraitists. It was a time of great experimentation. As Grace Seiberling reports during the 1850s the comments of critics on photography exhibitions illustrate that there were few fixed standards for a photograph’s appearance. By the 1860s, however, when Cameron started her work, photography had changed dramatically. Thousands of professionals and amateurs had taken up the form. With the rise of commercial photography amateurs were pitted against professionals, photographs had to be clean, complete and precisely detailed. Although others had put forward the notion that impressionism might be artistic, this was a minority view. Portrait photographers used all the light they could get – resulting in rather flat-looking images, the subject matter of photographs for ‘professionals’ featured portraits, narrative and genre scenes. Photographs had become commodities for the masses rather than a novelty or an art form. Following on this inrush of professionals and their societies, journals, manuals, manifestos and criticism a group of amateurs started to create new kinds of portraits. Cameron may be said to be in this group along with Lewis Caroll and Clemintina Lady Hawarden. These three worked against now established conventions by experimenting with light, groupings, posing, negatives and printing. Soft – focus photography in the early phase of Camerons ten-year career was not only a creative experiment, but a political and even religious gesture. Cameron wished on the one hand to restore a line back to painters and early photographers and on the other hand to tie photography to eternal laws of nature and art, as she understood them. Referencing to Lewis Carroll (author of Alice and wonderland) in the book girlhood by Claire Marie Healy she makes a reference to an image by Peter Blake, 1970, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and describes: ‘if girlhood is often thought of as a hole we drop into and scabble out of by our nails – hoping that we might emerge into adulthood unscathed from all its events – then what happens if we drop into that hole, following one of its most recognisable products as we go? Not through, but perhaps down…’ she states ‘I prefer to see Blake’s Alice as a girl who, like one dropped into the hole of adolescence, troubles easy definitions’ linking this to what it means to be feminine; images can create deeper suggestions about ideologies in this case girlhood.
Peter Blake, Just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run 1970, screenprint on this paper,24.3 x 18, Tate
Justine Kurland’s work links more to a contemporary and theoretical style of photography. Kurland created a famous book called ‘Girl Pictures’ which involves images she took between 1997 and 2002, later creating and publishing the book in 2020. All the images show young girls that Kurland has found whilst on a road trip throughout West America in bucolic /natural environments. She used the style of Tableaux photography to ensure her images had a story behind them, the girls are almost always doing something as a group in the photos. I think an important reason as to why the book Girl Pictures is so put together and flows well is that Kurland did not plan to do this project, she was on a road trip, found teenage girls and asked if they would be in the pictures, continued to travel through America, and then left the images for about 20 years and came back to them during lockdown and created this ‘narrative’ around femininity and girlhood. The project can also be seen as very nostalgic for Kurland as she used to travel and practically live in her van, however not anymore, “Somehow, it’s detached from where you actually are, because the work itself took on a kind of form once I started working on these road trips. I had to sell the van to stop doing that because driving is so fun, and I regret selling it every day.” – Kurland states in an interview with Vanity Fair. In an essay that accompanies Aperture’s new bound collection of the work, she calls that van, which she drove around in at the time of Girl Pictures, an ‘invisible collaborator’. “I could find girls wherever I stopped, but they went home after we made photographs, while I kept driving,” she wrote. “My road trips underscored the pictures I staged—the adventure of driving west a performance in itself.” Not only can the project be nostalgic for Kurland, but also the girls who participated. Rebecca Schiffman, one of the girls who is now grown up, performed a song dedicated to the memory of another girl Kurland photographed, Lily Wheelright who died in 2007 at the age of 24. This project has so many deeper connections and it emphasises the theme of femininity and how emotionally connected girls can be with one and other, the book brings together a sense of community and love. Justine Kurland states: ‘I staged photographs of teenage girls as surrogates for myself in a fantasy of a coming world, one where solidarity between girls offered intimacy and protection, where girls were made stronger through the presence of other girls focused on teenagers because of their perpetual state of becoming – a latency that resounds with the freedoms and simple joys of childhood. I wanted to foreground girls’ lives, centring them by creating an all-female society. I employed the trope of the teenage runaway as a shortcut to freeing them from the cage of their suburban bedrooms and bringing them into a world of their own making, so we could get to the more difficult work of determining how we might be together.’ Kurland’s images give a narrative that the girls were running away which almost backs the stereotype teenage girls usually have which is being rebellious, however, the way femininity is displayed is not too radical, its simply just girls being free as the landscape offered its own drama. The girls built forts, made campfires, trespassed in abandoned buildings, explored highway underpasses and found swimming holes nestled between shady trees and pillowy patches of moss. The girls performed scenes of caretaking that became actual caretaking: feeding each other, brushing each other’s hair, walking arm in arm. Justine intended for them to playact a state of communal bliss.
It is very apparent that both artists have explored what it means to be feminine with different approaches, different values and beliefs at the time due to the different waves of feminism. It’s important to explore where photographing what it means to be feminine originated from, Julia Margaret Cameron. Compared to now, how much ideas surrounding femininity have altered and the different ways it can be expressed. Cameron’s soft – focus pictorialist portraits of women in their long drapery clothing, just existing within the image, however the soft feminine features still being picked up… her large-scale close-up portraits were seen as a rejection towards conventional photography in favour of a less precise but more emotionally compelling kind of portraiture. Kurland’s images offer more to observe and analyse, she was able to tell a story throughout her photobook, what it means to be feminine is to be free, loving, caring and not so held down by the stress when transitioning from a teenager to an adult. The girls weren’t doing anything other than surviving as a group yet also as an individual in natural environments, this implies that that is what girls should be doing in an ideal world and where they are able to thrive the most. All of this linking to my response which is creating a photobook which illustrates what girls in my friend group do to ‘escape’ the stress which is usually overlooked by people close to us, the pressure that is suddenly put on us as we transition from teenagers into adults, and most importantly how limited young people are living on an island with nothing except each other and seasonally pretty beaches and lanes. Unlike Kurland’s narrative of running away young people in jersey can’t really run away unless they are privileged or aspire else were, the pressure of having to always be realistic when as a girl you can’t help but be deeply emotional about situations when all you wish to do is be free. ‘Teenage girls take in how things look: the way girls today might describe objects as simply ‘aesthetic’ or, in the words of something I saw on TikTok, their need to romanticise absolutely everything’ – Claire Marie Healy, girlhood. Using Jersey to the only advantage it has, I photographed me and my friends in natural environments just existing within the dramatic, gloomy dark landscapes.