Title of my essay

How do Justine Kurland and Julia Margaret Cameron portray the theme of girlhood in their work?

Essay Plan:

Make a plan that lists what you are going to write about in each paragraph

• two artists- Justine Kurland and Julia Margaret Cameron
• compare how they portray girlhood/childhood

• Opening quote

‘Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.’

-Susan Sontag- On Photography

Introduction (250-500 words): What is your area study? Which artists will you be analysing and why? How will you be responding to their work and essay question?

– using my statement of intent

Our personal study project is based around the theme of nostalgia. For my personal study I want to explore identity, but more specifically femininity and what it means to be feminine. My interpretation of the theme nostalgia is going to be based on Girlhood and parts of my childhood that represent growing up as a girl. There’s a lot of women in my family who I’ve closely grew up around and my strong relationships with my friends and family are a big part of my life, which I appreciate a lot therefore I am creating my personal study around this.

I plan on photographing my friends and my family, my mum, sister, cousins, aunties and my grandma. I’m going to capture images of my friends in everyday situations when we meet up to create candid shots and to show real scenes of girlhood. As well as that, I plan on photographing my family at family events to create the same kind of images but with a different story.

Although I want to capture candid pictures that represent reality, I also want to do staged photoshoots. I am going to do research and study artists such as Justine Kurland, Sian Davey (developing my exam project from May of ‘Identity’) and Theo Gosselin. From then I will set up staged photoshoots in both rural and urban settings of my friends. For the exam project in May, me and my friends did a few photoshoots in rural environments, following the theme of ‘femininity’. These were inspired by Justine Kurland.

For my final images, I plan to present them in a photobook, I don’t plan on putting any text on/ with them at the moment, however this might change during the process of my project. I intend to start my project by taking photos of my friends in every day situations, for example, in the car, on walks, in town, later on in the evening/night when we meet up. This will give me a starting point to then decide if the outcomes are worth it and when, where and how to begin planning my staged photoshoots.

I plan on taking a variety of different images, in terms of composition, framing and lighting. However, I am mainly going to try and take photos in the rural environments with softer lighting to give the dusty, vintage kind of look. So around the time the sun is setting or rising, or on more overcast days so the lighting is dim. As well as that, the images I take in urban settings, town, I want darker lighting or on the other hand, bright lighting to create harsher shadows. Both types of photoshoots I want to use natural lighting, none in the studio. As well as documentary and tableaux for variety, also to represent the reality of girlhood.

I want my final outcome of a photobook to tell a story of girlhood and what it’s like growing up as a teenage girl on this island. I aim for the images to be quite relatable

• Pg 1 (500 words): Historical/ theoretical context within art, photography and visual culture relevant to your area of study. Make links to art movements/ isms and some of the methods employed by critics and historian. 

Girlhood is my theme so for my first paragraph I plan on explaining what it is and what it means, explain how girlhood was like years ago. How it was like living as a woman years ago compared to now. Could write about feminism movements.

• Pg 2 (500 words): Analyse first artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.

In this paragraph I will analyse Justine Kurlands work and explain how she presents girlhood in her work. I have done multiple artist references on her so I will use them to help me.

• Pg 3 (500 words): Analyse second artist/photographer in relation to your essay question. Present and evaluate your own images and responses.

In this paragraph I will analyse Julia Margaret Cameron’s work, how she presents girlhood ect. Compare her work to Kurland’s work. She was making work in the 1850s, a long time before Justine Kurland; also a big difference in woman’s rights and other things.

1. Conclusion (250-500 words): Draw parallels, explore differences/ similarities between artists/photographers and that of your own work that you have produced

I will compare overall differences and similarities of both artists work. Then I will relate this to my own work and the photos I have produced, how I was inspired by the artists.

• Bibliography: List all relevant sources used

Bengal, R. (2020). ‘The Jeremys’ in Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures. New York: Aperture foundation

I plan on doing my first photoshoot of candid and staged photos.

I want the environment of this photoshoot to be mainly of in and around my friends cars. I will create different photos from in and around the car from different point of views. This photoshoot will represent girlhood in the way of going out adventuring and feeling free.

I will take exterior shots from outside the car to juxtapose the interior shots from inside of the car of my friends.

I plan to take these images around the times of sunset, so before and during, this is because I want the natural, dim, strong lighting to create dreamy silhouettes and backlighting. I’m hoping the dramatic skies cause rich and intense colours in my images.

Theo Gosselin is a French photographer. He is mostly famous for his bohemian pictures taken during different road-trips around the world.  Deliberately cinematic, his photography reveals friends in the act of escaping from their regular lives into newly enticing and perilous modes of existence, ever in search of the persistent though elusive idea of freedom.

Theo Gosselin pictures, like Justine Kurland, are a true homage to freedom, captured like a snapshot. His favourite themes are life, love, his generation, his adventures, and large spaces; in definition a youth thirsted for freedom and an alternative living, where human values and harmony with nature dominate.

Passionate about drawing, music, and cinema, he chose a path through the art school, and graduated in 2012 as a graphic designer in Amiens. He started photography around 2007 and chose to pursue and develop this. He loves to capture the simple life, love, good and bad moments, his friends and his adventures. Gosselin is an eternal traveller and shares his way of life with the people he loves; because the truth is in wide open spaces and in the heart of the characters he meets along the way.

His work is simple but heart-breaking, pictures which speak the language of feelings and true emotions. Without artifices or lies, the young photographer captures the intimacy with tenderness and accompanies to adulthood.

This image is a good example of photos I want to be taking. The focal point of this image is the two people, however the viewers eyes are drawn to their surroundings. It looks like they are in a service area restaurant and it makes you wonder what their story is, are they runaways? Are they on their own adventure? Are they lost? I want my images to create this kind of atmosphere.

Best known for her powerful portraits, Julia Margaret Cameron was one of the most important and innovative photographers of the 19th century.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 – 79) was an ambitious and devoted pioneer of photography. Best known for her powerful portraits, she also posed her sitters – friends, family and servants – as characters from biblical, historical or allegorical stories. Cameron helped prove that portrait photography was indeed a veritable fine art medium in a context where photography was not yet widely accepted as such.

When Julia Margaret Cameron began taking pictures in the 1860s, photography was largely defined by formal commercial studio portraits, elaborate high art narratives, or clinical scientific or documentary renderings. Cameron, on the other hand, forged her own path as a thoughtful and experimental portrait artist who happened to use a camera instead of paint.

–Annie by Julia Margaret Cameron

Cameron didn’t take her first photograph until age 48. The camera gave Cameron something to do as all her children were grown and her husband was often away on business. From that moment on, Cameron dedicated herself to mastering the difficult tasks of processing negatives and focusing on subjects in order to capture beauty.

Cameron considered her 1864 portrait of Annie Philpot to be her first successful work of art.

She wasted no time in marketing, exhibiting, and publishing her artistic photographs, and it wasn’t long before she was successfully exhibiting and selling prints of her photographs in London and abroad.

She proved that portrait photography was a true art form, she described her unique goal as an artist in her unfinished memoir.

I have chose to study Julia Margaret Cameron as her work has the same theme as mine. She has the theme of girlhood in her portraits, representing womanhood and motherhood.

Cameron presents Girlhood in a slightly different way to my work as her work doesn’t particularly portray the feeling of being free, but more representing the meaning of female figures in her time.

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.

Our personal study project is based around the theme of nostalgia. For my personal study I want to explore identity, but more specifically femininity and what it means to be feminine. My interpretation of the theme nostalgia is going to be based on Girlhood and parts of my childhood that represent growing up as a girl. There’s a lot of women in my family who I’ve closely grew up around and my strong relationships with my friends and family are a big part of my life, which I appreciate a lot therefore I am creating my personal study around this.

I plan on photographing my friends and my family, my mum, sister, cousins, aunties and my grandma. I’m going to capture images of my friends in everyday situations when we meet up to create candid shots and to show real scenes of girlhood. As well as that, I plan on photographing my family at family events to create the same kind of images but with a different story.

Although I want to capture candid pictures that represent reality, I also want to do staged photoshoots. I am going to do research and study artists such as Justine Kurland, Sian Davey (developing my exam project from May of ‘Identity’) and Theo Gosselin. From then I will set up staged photoshoots in both rural and urban settings of my friends. For the exam project in May, me and my friends did a few photoshoots in rural environments, following the theme of ‘femininity’. These were inspired by Justine Kurland.

-Examples of Kurland, Davey and Gosselin’s work

For my final images, I plan to present them in a photobook, I don’t plan on putting any text on/ with them at the moment, however this might change during the process of my project. I intend to start my project by taking photos of my friends in every day situations, for example, in the car, on walks, in town, later on in the evening/night when we meet up. This will give me a starting point to then decide if the outcomes are worth it and when, where and how to begin planning my staged photoshoots.

I plan on taking a variety of different images, in terms of composition, framing and lighting. However, I am mainly going to try and take photos in the rural environments with softer lighting to give the dusty, vintage kind of look. So around the time the sun is setting or rising, or on more overcast days so the lighting is dim. As well as that, the images I take in urban settings, town, I want darker lighting or on the other hand, bright lighting to create harsher shadows. Both types of photoshoots I want to use natural lighting, none in the studio. As well as documentary and tableaux for variety, also to represent the reality of girlhood. Additionally, if I feel it is necessary, after I have my final images from the different photoshoots, I will create some edits using photoshop and Lightroom. Nothing AI based or artificial as that isn’t where my project is going.

I want my final outcome of a photobook to tell a story of girlhood and what it’s like growing up as a teenage girl on this island. I aim for the images to be quite relatable but also exaggerate the meaning of femininity.

-mood board

This mood board consists of images from Sian Davey, Justine Kurland.

I am going to base my personal study off these kind of photographers, who take photographs that represent femininity.

– mind map

These are some ideas for my photoshoots:

Over year 12 and 13, we have studied many different topics those including, Anthropocene, environmental portraiture, new topographic, identity and experimenting with different lightings like chiaroscuro, rim lighting, Rembrandt diamond cameos and multi exposure.

Past projects:

Femininity vs masculinity

The Identity topic we studied was my favourite project. My final images from this project are definitely my strongest outcomes and I also really enjoyed producing these images.

For the identity project I specifically focused on Femininity and trying to capture what femininity means in some ways.

I studied artists such as Sian Davey and Deana Lawson. The main artist I was inspired by was Justine Kurland but more specifically her photos from the project ‘Girl Pictures’. Justine Kurland is known for her utopian images of American landscapes and their fringe communities, sought to reclaim this space with her now-iconic series, Girl Pictures.

Justine Kurland’s images

3 of my images:

Anthropocene

The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.

My final outcomes for the Anthropocene project were successful. I liked this project because we had a variety of options for things to photograph that came under the topic of Anthropocene. I chose to focus on the pollution in the ocean, more specifically, the stuff off the fields in Jersey that gets dumped into the ocean.

This could be a potential idea for my personal study as I like the landscape outcomes, also, growing up round those areas of the beaches could link to the nostalgia theme.

Street Photography

Street photography, a genre of photography that records everyday life in a public place. The very publicness of the setting enables the photographer to take candid pictures of strangers, often without their knowledge.

For this project we had the chance to go on a day trip to St Malo to study the town and take pictures relating to street photography.

I didn’t manage to take very many photos whilst I was there, however I think the outcomes from the photoshoot were really strong and successful.

I think street photography is very interesting as you can focus on people and their behaviour in public, as well as being able to capture images from every day situations.

Our final still image film:

https://jerseyedu-my.sharepoint.com/personal/p_evans13_hautlieu_sch_je/_layouts/15/stream.aspx?id=%2Fpersonal%2Fp%5Fevans13%5Fhautlieu%5Fsch%5Fje%2FDocuments%2FElizabeth%20Castle%2Emp4&ct=1700649489306&or=OWA%2DNT&cid=b2c55e6b%2D1667%2Dfc30%2D84f9%2D1635fe812200&fromShare=true&ga=1&referrer=StreamWebApp%2EWeb&referrerScenario=AddressBarCopied%2Eview

These are the final outcomes for the images we will be using in our film. As our film is going to be based off the history of Elizabeth castle and what it was used for in the past, I edited these images into black and white to evoke the moods of nostalgia, sadness and yearning. As well as using black and white to emphasise the storyline of our film, there was not much colour in the images anyway apart from dull beige colours that took over the image; the black and white distracts that for the viewer.

Image analysis

This image was very underexposed when I was choosing which images to edit for final images. I decided to experiment with it, I increased the exposure, brightness and highlights to brighten the image and slightly decreased the shadows so they weren’t as overpowering the image. However, I did increase the contrast a bit to keep the image parted with the light coming from the top of the stairs and the darker, shadowed stairs. Although this image was an experiment i liked the outcome so made it a final image of mine.

I liked this image straight away as the square shaped ‘window’ of the point of view from inside the castle force a focal point of the pier and boat in the background. The window causes kind of a boarder to draw the viewers attention to the scene outside. The camera is focused on the setting outside, it is more exposed and brighter in comparison to the darkness inside the castle. With the context of our film being based around the history of Elizabeth castle, this could represent how lonely soldiers felt while at war, trapped inside a dark place whilst looking out.