Nationality United States Period Neo-romanticism Role Photographer | Name Justine Kurland Movement Neo-romanticism | |
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Born 1969 Warsaw, NY Notable work 'Spirit West', 'Old Joy' Books Justine Kurland: Highway Kind Education | ||
/Dialogues Highlight: The Open Road
Justine Kurland (born 1969 in Warsaw, NY) is a fine art photographer based in New York.
Contents
- Dialogues Highlight The Open Road
- FotoFocus Symposium Second Century Photography Feminism Politics
- Education
- Life and career
- Books significant catalogues
- References
FotoFocus Symposium (Second Century: Photography, Feminism & Politics)
Education
Kurland earned her B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in 1996. She went on to Yale University where she studied with Gregory Crewdson and Philip-Lorca diCorcia and graduated with an M.F.A. in 1998.
Life and career
Kurland first gained public notice with her work in the group show Another Girl, Another Planet (1999), which displayed her large c-print staged tableau pictures of neo-romantic landscapes inhabited by young adolescent girls, half-sprites, half juvenile delinquents.
As landscapes she chose the 'secret places' of late childhood; wasteland on the edges of suburbia, 'owned' only by a feral nature and unsupervised children. Her limited-edition book Spirit West (2000) featured similar work on a more ambitious scale. In early 2001 Kurland spent several months in New Zealand, where she created similar work with schoolgirls there.
In her show Community, Skyblue (2002), Kurland turned to documenting the utopian communes of Virginia and California, highlighting the unworldly aspirations of the communards by having them appear naked in her pictures and showing them as only distant figures in their landscape. In 2003 she had European solo shows Golden Dawn (London) and Welcome Home (Vienna), based around these series of commune images.
Her latest book, Old Joy (2004) turns to men. She shows visionaries trekking naked into the wilderness, where they undergo spiritual experiences. In her 2004 show Songs of Experience she explored medieval and Biblical imagery. In 2005 she had a solo show in Japan.
Kurland's work also appears on the cover and liner notes of French electronic/shoegaze group M83's 2004 album Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, as well as the covers of the EP releases for this album.
In an article in ArtForum (April 2000) she talked of her inspirations:
"I'm always thinking about painting: nineteenth-century English picturesque landscapes and the utopian ideal, genre paintings, and also Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs. I started going to museums at an early age, but my imagery is equally influenced by illustrations from the fairy tales I read as a child."
Outside of the art world press, she has been profiled in The New York Times, Vogue and ELLE.
In 2014 selections from her work Highway Kind were published in the Aperture book The Open Road: Photography & the American Road Trip.