Book Review: “justine kurland: girl pictures”
By Kelli Connell | October 20, 2020
Published by Aperture in May of 2020
11" x 8.8" / 144 pages / 76 color images / Text by Justine Kurland and Rebecca Bengal
Light pink. The color baby girls are often dressed in, that’s the color of the book. The cover is feminine, sweet, soft to the touch, mimicking the ways we have learned to describe girls. A flip to the back cover reveals text embossed in heavy black: The girls were rebelling. The girls were acting out. The girls had run away from home, that much was clear… I, in turn, ask myself, “What were these girls rebelling against? Why were they acting out? What exactly had they run away from?”
Justine Kurland creates a place for girls only. Girl Pictures takes place in the dirt, the dust and the ash that has accumulated over generations of women’s experience. For the most part, it’s a place of harmony, a place of resourcefulness and ingenuity, a place of discovery and community. Here is a place of respect and openness. A place where the competition and the prize shifts, for the rules have now changed. Girls here, living together without the presence of men, are allowed a breadth of being.
The first images in Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures start in the city, New York City to be exact. It’s as if these girls came up from that train tunnel. Perhaps they decided to meet here first before leaving. As the pages turn, they move further out of the city. They sleep under freeways, hitchhike by car and rig, wash themselves and their clothes in the sinks of dingy bathrooms along the way. They find protection in abandoned cars and tent camps they have set up. They learn to kill and live off the meat. They live off the land. They move from the outskirts of suburbs to forests and deserts. They walk on the precipice of being not yet women. They play for each other. They perform for each other. They practice and learn things for themselves.
After what feels like months spent wandering, we almost believe it, this world of just girls. Almost, until we see the few boys who have wandered into their world through four images out of seventy-six with similar titles: Boy Torture: Hanging; Boy Torture: Two-Headed Monster; Boy Torture: Love; and Boy Torture: Circle. There is a lot we don’t know about these boys. Did they wander into these woods? Did some of the girls drag them there? Did the girls agree to a code? Did the girls make a pact to enact a renegade enforcement of punishments by a new law? Whatever the case, these images are few; we experience them quickly and move on.
We move with the girls page after page as they keep moving, keep learning, keep living in a place that’s hard but in which they find solace in one another. At times the girls seem sisterly, at times best friends. At times they are lovers, some first learning about their desires for one another. They have sex in abandoned cars. They learn that women can be strong. They build shelters and practice their fighting skills before night falls. They curl up, tight around one another, in wild prairie grass, with the sound of cars on the road in the distance.
Reaching the essay in the back of the book, Kurland writes:
My runaways built forts in idyllic forests and lived communally in a perpetual style of youthful bliss. I wanted to make the communion of girls visible, foregrounding their experiences as primary and irrefutable. I imagined a world in which acts of solidarity between girls would engender even more girls – they would multiply through the sheer force of togetherness and lay claim to a new territory. Their collective awakening would ignite and spread through suburbs and schoolyards, calling to clusters of girls camped on stoops and the hoods of cars, or aimlessly wandering the neighborhoods where they lived. Behind the camera, I was also somehow in front of it- one of them, a girl made strong by other girls.
The dangers of this world are still there, but beyond that hill, over those hedges, a few miles downstream. We can decide to go there, we’ll have to one day, but for now, let’s stay.
Girl Pictures is available from Aperture.
All photographs are from Girl Pictures and courtesy of the artist and Aperture.