On the wrong thing being right

Justine Kurland is an artist and photographer based in New York City known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes with their real—and imagined—fringe communities. Her early work comprises the critically acclaimed photo series Girl Pictures (1991-2002), as well as Of Woman Born (2005-2007) and Highway Kind (2006-2015). Her recent series of collages, SCUMB Manifesto, continues to make space for women by transforming books by canonized male photographers through destruction and reparation. Her work is included in permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum, Pennsylvania; Getty Museum, California; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, among others.

I want to start with your collage work and how it potentially expands on or deviates from your photography. What drew you to collage? Do similar themes seem to translate across both mediums?

Yeah, great question. The collage work seems like it’s a really big departure because it’s a different medium, it’s different tools, it’s additive rather than subtractive. I think photography takes away from the world. But I think that the core idea in the work—this idea that photography is a speculative tool that helps us imagine the world that we want to live in—I feel like that part is the same. Starting with the Girl Pictures, the thing about photography is this idea that in making our own images, we can be self-possessed. We can decide who we are and how we represent.The thing about photography is that it makes us. It makes a world.

There’s something about the collage of going into this canon, this historical canon, that has done so much harm to women, to people of color, to queer people. [The canon has] created the kind of status quo and these insidious biases. There’s a baggage it carries. Un-making that feels really good and feels like a powerful thing to do. The photography that I’m excited about now… Well, there’s so many great practitioners, but I do think about this idea of breaking filing cabinets. It’s not about everyone staying in their lane. This kind of media un-specificity, it seems like an important way to think about how useful categorizations are in terms of gender, in terms of race, in terms of borders—and what could be porous and what can pass back and forth through seems really interesting for photography to consider.

SCUMB Manifesto offers a thesis on creation and destruction. Can you speak more about that seemingly paradoxical process of breaking something apart as an act of reclamation?

There’s something so liberating about collage, in the sense that it cuts up the things that were force-fed: the mass media, the cultural. You can break it apart, and in that breaking apart, maybe reveal something else about it, or be able to show something invisibly hidden in it. Or to actually just revise the whole proposition of the values that the image is trying to project.

There’s part of collage that’s all about ripping up and tearing apart and a destruction—and maybe also subtractive, in that sense that we were talking about before—and then this other part of it is about, “How do you create a new whole through repairing these fragments? What does it mean to center the margins and to bring things into a new unity? And how does that new unity, that has maybe more multiplicity inside of it, create a model for a livable space?” We’re not all the same. We don’t want to be the body politic homogenized into this kind of one, but how do we live with our diverse differences in a kind of harmony?

The female body is very prominent in your work, in depictions of motherhood, intimacy, and sisterhood. It’s explicit, but it’s not exploitative, which I think is a really fine line to walk. You walk it so well.

I don’t know if I always do it so well, but I’ve gotten really obsessed with Lee Friedlander’s Nudes, a book that he made in 1991. He’s one of the most celebrated canonized photographers, and Nudes is a book where he asks all these women to bend over and contort. They’re very uncomfortable positions, and then he flashes them with this flash, which feels very forensic and violent. So, anyway, I cut up a bunch of his books, and I made a bunch of large-scale collages with multiple copies of the same book. I think that there’s something that I’ve tried to do with the nudes where I’ve lesbianated them. I love that. Lesbian is a verb. All of these women are birthing each other and having sex with each other and this kind of many-women Frankenstein.

The idea of cutting those books was to examine my own origin story. My father was a painter, and in this idea of thinking about my own complicity and the ways that I was socialized female… The last iteration is I’ve been painting his paintings, and also painting my own collages into the paintings, as this kind of mashup of a contamination of these two genres of work—that are both a critique of my father and my fraught relationship with him, but are also to go back to this kind of ambivalence about love. In painting his paintings, it’s like I’m forcing him to parent me. I’m forcing him to teach me how to paint.

As an artist, it’s copyright. I mean, it’s a total wrong thing to do, but that’s why it’s the right thing to do, for me anyway. The word to reappropriate is just to take back something that was already yours. There’s something really interesting in the idea that if you read something over and over and over, there is this transference that happens. It’s like a vigil; it’s almost religious.

I’m having a show [this fall] at OSMOS, and we’re calling it My First Retrospective. There’s one or two pieces from each of the series that I’ve ever made. It maps out from the Girl Pictures, which is the first work that I ever made, through to the SCUMB, and all of these kind of stops along the way, which involves three decades of road trip photography before I get off the road and have this, I don’t know, midlife crisis. There was this moment around 2018 where I made a book called The Stick, where I made all of these photographs of my home, of my mother, of my lover, of my actual house, where I’m looking inward. That’s what led to this deepening questioning of my own origin story and cutting up the photo books, and then finally coming to this dad situation.

I think what ends up happening is the work itself suggests what you should make next. At a certain point in your work, it’s like you’re no longer the driver. You’re more the channeler. It’s like, you make something, and if this is true, what else is true? Then that’s the generative force, I think, for most artists.

To move any kind of series from private to public, you kind of forfeit ownership to it, if you feel like you even owned it in the first place. How do physical shows and live audience viewership alter how you see your work?

There still is this thing of what my intentions are as opposed to what’s received. I feel like my biggest understanding of that difference happened with Girl Pictures, because those were made in the late ’90s and early 2000s. When I re-exhibited Girl Pictures in 2018, and then in 2020 when the Girl Pictures book came out, the narrative around that work was no longer about stage narrative photography. It was about Trump. It was about the MeToo movement. We had just lost our right for reproductive choice. And we had just come out of COVID where we were all isolated from each other. So it meant something so different.

But what’s interesting about the Girl Pictures is that, for me, I made it so long ago, it feels like a baton. I have all of these people who I follow, and who follow me on social media, who have taken up the baton, who are younger photographers photographing young women… I feel like that work belongs to them more than me. I don’t feel possessive or proprietary about that work. I feel like it shifts. Georgia O’Keeffe might say that her paintings are not about vaginas, but that’s culturally what people think. I feel like art is relational in that we decide collectively what’s important and what something means and why it means.

This is more related to when you were doing more straightforward photography, but how do you connect your creative vision for a project with your actual subjects during shooting? How do you guide that experience for them?

With the Girl Pictures, for instance, I would have an idea of what I would want them to do, like a scenario I would ask them to enact. And then I would just keep shooting and see where it went. It wasn’t an illustration of something that I had already drawn out. I’d have a starting place, and then it would unravel, and it was that unraveling that created the space for whatever they brought. I think that’s true of any photograph that’s good. If you’re photographing someone, they are bringing something. The best pictures are given, not taken. That’s just how it goes.

I would work with similar girls over time and they’d be like, “Oh, I met this new person who wants to do the pictures. You’re going to love her.” Or, “I found a place where you’d want to go.” They would even come up with scenarios that they would want to do. I feel like the teenage girls were maybe different than other people that I photographed. The way that we find our identity is to model all of these different personas. I think photography really helps mediate what that can look like. It’s like a mirror for them. There’s a certain kind of posturing that they want to do. And when I was making those pictures, it was before everyone had cell phones where they could just do their own pictures. I feel like you couldn’t make Girl Pictures now, because when you look at someone’s photographs on their Instagram or whatever, they always have the same look or the same side of their face that they like to see.

I know that you said that the previous series would inform the next one, but when you transition into a new series, is there an outlining or planning period? What does that feel like?

I think that there’s a point from one series to the next series where it’s not like you’re ever done with something. I feel like these other questions open up, and those other questions draw you in more than the questions that you were doing before. When I was photographing the teenage girls, the idea was that they were all teenage runaways, but somehow the idiosyncratic part was this kind of lesbian feminist land collective. That was just my own pleasure. If you were actually a teenage runaway, you would probably live in a city and dumpster dive and do whatever you could to survive. But I was trying to create a world that I wanted to live in.

I did that for a while, and then I had a baby, and then I had all these feelings about motherhood and just the shit show of it. I made work that I titled after an Adrienne Rich book called Of Woman Born, where I was trying to make photographs of motherhood that get away from the status quo and this kind of Handmaid’s Tale idea of what it would be to be in a feminist collective and to be in the woods. There were certain things that would lead from one thing to the other. It kind of moved back and forth between autobiography and politics, following hunches.

Do you ever discover narratives after completing a collage, a shoot, or a painting that surprise you?

Yeah. When I made Girl Pictures, I wasn’t even queer then. I was dating boys. So that happened. It’s such queer visuals. I feel like the only reason to make art is to know yourself, and it always reveals you to yourself. That’s always the beauty of making it. Even replicating my father’s paintings, it still returns me to myself. Even in these kind of appropriative acts, or these things where I’m channeling something or getting rid of myself—it’s still there. Maybe I expand.

Have you always felt like an artist, or were there certain milestones where you began to think of yourself that way? How does that term, being an artist, formulate in your brain over time?

You know what’s interesting? As a photographer, I feel like there’s a kind of photographer reflex where it’s like, “I’m not an artist, I’m a photographer.” It’s a funny thing. When did I start using the word artist instead of photographer? Maybe after grad school. Grad school’s interesting because then you learn to call your photographs pieces instead of photographs. You make work. I’ve been teaching now for 20 years, and it’s interesting because it is a little bit weird, the professionalization of the arts. I really love my students. I feel like I learn more from them than they learn from me. But what I don’t feel good about is the way that the art market, how they’re able to put work on the walls, is because the artists have day jobs.

This mythology of the artist as a genius who’s outside of society and gets to live by their own wiles is a false narrative. In fact, we need art. It keeps us alive. It keeps us imagining. We definitely need art, but we live in a society where it’s like, you’ll spend $10 on a cappuccino, but can’t even spend 99 cents to download a song. It’s not valued. Art isn’t valued, but we need it. We know how seeing something beautiful, reading something beautiful, listening to something beautiful just makes all of the difference. Especially for me, it’s like a religion. I feel like it’s my belief system; it’s my everything. I couldn’t exist without it.

I’ve been very successful. I mean, I still haven’t paid my student loans, but I’ve been very successful. Money is not necessarily what makes an artist. I think that the commitment of whatever someone is doing—to be able to follow it through, and to be rigorous, and to really give time and energy and love to something—is so worthwhile.