Justine Kurland is a photographer born in 1969 in the US state of New York. It seemed clear to me early on that one of the things a photograph could do was make a reality, and I wanted to do that. I always think of looking inside an Easter egg and seeing a perfect world. It's not like I'm studying gender. I found this helpful because we were so used to taking classes and saying what the work was supposed to be from day one. Darker than any picture that I've ever made before. A freedom which is already this privileged entitlement. The photograph becomes a site to stage a fantasy, yet your figure inside the frame seems fugitive. And the lady said ‘I have worked here for 25 years and I’ve never seen anyone with this scholarship’. There is the whole idea of parenting on the road, and about seeing everything through Casper's eyes, and about Casper's collaboration in whatever it is that we're photographing. It’s kind of amazing to think about what kids were getting away with. Our guest in this episode is photographer, writer and teacher Justine Kurland. But I remembered looking at all these James Welling pictures and thinking about how his work is so much about the self-reflexive moments of a photographer that it's almost as if the train in his photograph disappears and it becomes a photograph of nothing in a way, because it's impossible to make a new picture of a train. ... “I had this desire to make this girl world, this feminist utopic solidarity between (young) girls and teenagers,” Kurland said in a recent phone interview. I'm not a hardcore landscape artist. Photographer Justine Kurland reclaimed this space in her now-iconic series of images of teenage girls, taken between 1997 and 2002 on the road in the American wilderness. There was something about just going and waiting. You would think that in wealth there is all of this freedom, which of course there is, but in the end, I was the one who got to pursue my art and she was the one who got to be the wife of a banker. To think about the economic boom in American car culture, especially the idea of a muscle car, that people would take from a factory, customise the interiors, the engine adding extra power, and whatever they felt made their car theirs. I would go up to them and ask lots of intrusive questions, and I drew out from him that he was Silas Rhodes, a part of the Rhodes family and he owned SVA. Raised on the Road: Justine Kurland in Conversation with Her Son, Casper After years traversing the U.S. together in a van, the photographer and her son sit down for a candid interview. She found me later and what’s interesting is that we both wanted to be photographers. During labor, I crawled back and forth across the floor on … Her mom never liked me. Art is supposed to be about this kind of intensified experience of life. I’ve used a picture of her before to illustrate a post about cyber culture by Terence McKenna. sleuthmikan-blog liked this . When I went to his office, he joked “don’t start taking off your clothes.” He was this funny guy that day I went, and I never spoke to him again because I was terrified, I had told the other waitress to go ask him for help. It's really specific who I photograph--it's almost intuitive. It's of a tunnel—the light at the end of the tunnel—and it says "hope" on the wall. I feel like everything I do is counterintuitive, antiproductive. And the thought, the planning the long staring silence that had gone out to the fields, went now to the roads, to the distance, to the West. It was right at the time that Casper was supposed to go to kindergarten, and I was like, OK, I have to get off the road and let my kid have a normal childhood. After her sister died, her family got in the car anyway, because her sister was coming home for Christmas. There is a theatrical distance from the narrative so that there's more of a questioning, and in that way there is a play—that I think my work has always had—between reality and a kind of fantasy realm or extrapolation of a fantasy or a romantic idea of life. I don't check the train schedules. I picked the right choice as an artist. And I was like that’s so interesting because I’m about to apply there. Justine Kurland Reflects on Her Photographs of Teenage Girl Runaways By Justine Kurland aperture.org — Between 1997 and 2002, the photographer portrayed teenage girls as imagined rebels, offering a radical vision of community and feminism against the … He died, his son took over the school. There was this thing about reading Jack Kerouac, something about American identity; it is interesting to think that freedom is one of those words that changes so dramatically. See what Justine Kurland (justine_kurland) found on Pinterest, the home of the world's best ideas. I think that work is so strong and so important. 7,335 Followers, 687 Following, 1,225 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Justine Kurland (@justine4good) It started with trains and how they shaped the American west literally and figuratively. Better be an enriching experience for him. Raised on the Road: Justine Kurland in Conversation with Her Son, Casper After years traversing the U.S. together in a van, the photographer and her son sit down for a candid interview. "I staged the girls as a standing army of teenaged runaways in resistance to patriarchal ideals," says Kurland. Justine Kurland, Casper Roasting Marshmallows, July 11, 2013, Courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Ultimately I think that it's not the artist who should be the upholder of moral responsibility, but then I think it's a personal responsibility to be a moral person. by VICE Staff. It was after the 2008 recession, and there was a more political, economic shift in the world. Experimental interface to a collection of biographical data describing photographers, studios, manufacturers, and others involved in the production of photographic images. Trains are really a male-dominated field: All the rail fans are men, and train riders are predominantly men. Instead of encountering danger, these wayward spirits would form a sylvan utopia where girls could make their own rules. She believed that photography and the west meant discovery, and that always had a narrative. In the ‘U-ni-ty’ book about the unification of Germany, he mixes in his own very formal photographs of Berlin together with images from the Third Reich, with images he appropriated from newspapers during the time the unification was being signed. I mean, he's like, "Your pussy's a waste of time. from Yale University in 1998. Justine: What’s interesting about teaching is combing through the history of what I’ve learned and then teaching it, and thinking about what it all means, it’s like I’ve come out on the other side in a sense. But yes, she was the reason. I have to back up a little bit. So I was interested in the idea of this clichéd American iconography of the West. But I think the trajectory of my work has been about my hand being pulled away from the narrative, and what defines my photographs is this portal to a certain kind of fantasy of America, of what our national identity is, a seminal identity. Justine Kurland (born in Warsaw, New York, 1969) received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Yale University. Her work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, and International Center of … Justine Kurland was born in 1969 in Warsaw, New York. The sense of freedom and this idea of going west, the idea of the west was always so exciting. In the spirit of the 19th-century landscape photographers, who produced idealized, utopian images of the American wilderness, Justine Kurland crisscrosses the country with her 4 x 5 camera and her young son, meeting and photographing fellow travelers in grand natural settings. And he was like come to my office, and we can talk about it. The iconography of travel and escape is everywhere in my photographs, and this journey was about being a teenage runaway, a narrative that runs through my work. Kurland ganó su primer premio público por la exposición de grupo Another Girl, Another Planet (1999), que presentaba su largo recorrido de paisajes neo-románticos habitados por chicas adolescentes, medio duendes y medio delinquentes. But male artists are always artists first. He embodies the American West and the outlaw and Thoreau. Now when you look at trains, they take trash to landfills, and they bring commodities from China to Walmart. I didn't know anyone there, and we were playing on the beach and he started playing with a little girl, and they were making sand castles and filling up their moat with water, and eventually Casper's pants got wet, so he just took them off, and the little girl looked over at him and said, "Ewww! And then it was also the time that my relationship with Casper's father had fallen apart. And from those pictures, it went to the train photographs, which was only because Casper was really into trains. It's very streamlined for him. Casper actually doesn't like hobos at all. Justine’s book ‘Highway Kind’ (published by Aperture) was fawned over by all of her students both Parsons grads, and her MFA ICP (International Center of Photography). Justine Kurland, Spit Bubble, 2013 Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash . I don't have one of those radios. And it was really pretty slowly that I started thinking about hobos, but it was in this way I do of everything becoming very subjective and not work. There are a lot of homeless people that I've been hanging around, and I have to think about how exploitative this work is and what does it mean to make pictures of someone that you then put in an art gallery as a luxury product. We’ve been waiting for this interview. Mount Baker, Commanding View by Justine Kurland, 2007. But I got really depressed being stuck in New York, and it seemed like a prison sentence stretching before both me and Casper: the institutionalization of his childhood through the public school system, and my enslavement of being stuck in one place. I find her inspiring, and I gave you guys one of her readings. Raised on the Road: Justine Kurland in Conversation with Her Son, Casper After years traversing the U.S. in a van, the photographer and her son sit down for a candid interview. They had become a kind of ideal for me, an abstraction. It was her camera obscura, and she was talking about what is a photograph and dismantling everything that we know about photography to get back to the very root of the camera obscura, the very basic part of photography. Justine Kurland lives and works in New York, NY. My father got diagnosed with cancer right at the time that those train pictures came out, and it had been really hard for me to find out that I was having a boy child and not a girl child, so maybe there's something cathartic in the work. For the record, I'm not a lesbian and I love your mother photos. Emotionally, we were all kind of wild, and her style of parenting was very free-range. I don’t know any of the girls in Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, but it really feels like I do. Justine Kurland Justine Kurland started showing her work in 1998. Don't come back around here unless you plan to use it." Justine Kurland, known for her idyllic portraits of girl runaways, commune hippies, and mothers with their children, spends most of the year on the road, a traveler searching out other travelers. At the time it came out a coworker of mine had ordered it online and brought it to work. July 19, 2010, 10:33am. The images that resulted—a selection of which were recently published by Ecstatic Peace Library as This Train Is Bound for Glory—evidence a shift in Kurland's photography. It's tricky because maybe you shouldn't even say that raising children is such a female experience, but I just don't know any men who feel it as deeply, but then why isn't that relevant to their work? I went to Stuyvesant High School which was a public school. She’d gone to Brown, and she became really well educated, she ended up marrying a wealthy banker, one who still got a bonus after the bailout. How did that happen? It's about waiting for the right moment. Women have so many different roles to play. His pictures all feel really raw; he has this beautiful way of weaving and braiding image repertoires. I was just thinking about trains. This past fall, Kurland released her latest photo book, Highway Kind , a virtuosic narrative comprised of 10 years of work that she made while criss-crossing America in a green van that she had retro-fitted to include a bed, a bookcase, cupboards and hardwood floors. It’s diaristic; it’s something that you can take with you. Justine Kurland raised her son Casper, who was born in 2004, in the back of a customized van he dubbed the 'Mama Car' and they traveled the country looking for subject matter until he turned six. In order to dismantle all the ways, photography categorises and exerts power over the viewer and the photographer. Getting you all to think about positioning, and trying to redefine the hegemonic normative, you have to break that or else you are part of the problem. On view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash through June 29, this show of Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures (1997-2002) is well timed. So if you were on the bed when the train came, you'd get swept into the wheels. Aw! The experience for runaways is pretty harsh, for instance, but you put them in a sort of Eden, the best place they could possibly end up. JTF (just the facts): A total of 31 black and white and color photographs by Justine Kurland, framed in white and matted, and hung against white walls in the main gallery space and the entry area.The 30 black and white works are gelatin silver prints, made between 2016 and 2018. It was such a beautiful and a genius way of talking about police brutality that is still very present now. Like, who gets to travel? So I had lots of different iterations of what photography meant to me depending on what I needed from it at the time. Some of the book's images are idyllic—Hemp Bracelet for Spanging, for instance, where two kids are sitting on a mossy log in an old forest—but others, like Debris from Hobo Children, show the actual wreckage of this romantic sort of rustic solitude. I was really mad and I was yelling at him and I said, "You know, Jeff Wall does not have to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the middle of his photo shoots. "I staged the girls as a standing army of teenaged runaways in resistance to patriarchal ideals," says Kurland. Or at least, I must … In his book Riding Towards Everywhere, William Vollmann acknowledges that he's exploitative to a certain degree—not necessarily in a way that's bad, but he needs other people, for whom being a hobo is their everyday life, just in order to experience a bit of that life and write his book. Like this guy Cuervo, who's in a bunch of the pictures. All of the readings I gave to you guys was somehow in one way or the other related to breaking down what the absolute truth in a photograph was, or the absolute beauty or the absolute right way to make a photograph. In the late 1990s, photographer Justine Kurland imagined runaway girls roaming the American landscape — gathering in the woods, along highways and in open fields. Last fall, I had a show of this work, and I was like, OK, this body of work is over. Interviews - December 19, 2016. I was like OK, I'm gonna be more political in my work. He was doing fine, and, God, it was great not to have to talk about, like, combustion engines or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Mitchell-Innes & Nash is honored to present Girl Pictures, 1997-2002 by Justine Kurland. He started kindergarten. Justine Kurland was our thesis professor at Parsons. It's a legitimate question. 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