American Book Review

The girls were rebelling. The girls were acting out. The girls had run away from home, that much was clear.

Justine Kurland's Girl Pictures gathers for the first time her photographs of girl gangs roving the American landscape, produced between 1997-2002. The pictures holler—Let's get out of Dodge!—as her protagonists skip town, get lost, and make do. Kurland sought her teenage collaborators on the fly and the improvisational aspect of the pictures is keenly felt. This spirit distinguishes the work from the archly cinematic ethos of the 1990s, including the work of her teachers Gregory Crewdson and Philip Lorca diCorcia. She began the project as a graduate student in the Northeast and the book charts the development of the work as she traveled west. Her egalitarian gaze sweeps through American cultural landscapes, mapping city streets, industrial wastelands, the in-between spaces of highways and developments, thick forests, yawning deserts, and Pacific shores. The skies open up and they disappear. Her kinship with nineteenth-century landscape photography is evident in the unapologetic awe of her settings and her travels run parallel to the runaway force of her protagonists' adventures as they traverse these freighted vistas. A feminist trick mirror, Kurland's road trip hijacks the archetypal journey of American westward expansion.

Within these tableaux, Kurland sets her protagonists loose, unleashing an emotional immediacy more often associated with the handheld camera. In Broadway (Joy) (2001), the camera is angled down on two girls as they dance on an empty desert road. Their energy fills the frame although the scale of their figures is diminutive. The body of one girl takes flight by the force of her exuberance, her blurred arms becoming wings. Kurland hitches the contemplative aspect of landscape to quotidian energy of the snapshot, creating both physical and emotional space for her heroines. In The End (2001), two tiny figures stand on the peak of a desert mound, their silhouettes camouflaged in a sea of cacti. They're not surveying the landscape nor are they are they subsumed in it. Instead, they inhabit the threshold between the terms of actor and setting. The history of photography is a lonely place for women as subjects and producers and the thrill of Girl Pictures is how Kurland disarms the gendered legacies of landscape with a shrug.

Kurland's landscapes make space for her teenage heroines within the American literary tradition of the quest narrative. The girls audition the characters from this tradition: runaway, explorer, cowboy, pirate, rebel. But, as stories go, not much happens in Girl Pictures. The girls smoke cigarettes, set fireworks, juggle, roast marshmallows, hula hoop, strum guitars, cuddle, play cards, horse around. They're killing time, basking in the pleasures of being unproductive members of society, and storytelling abhors lollygagging. Pulsing with the ineffable joy of being a teenager, the book mixes bucolic and feral pleasures. Forest (1998) gathers a party of girls in a glade of trees. Three of them tenderly makeover a fourth, braiding her hair with flowers and applying lip stick. I feel like I'm witnessing a secret assembly of the Cottingley Fairies rather than an ordinary teen ritual lifted from a domestic setting. Kurland indulges a voyeuristic impulse to watch the girls without fetishizing them, making space for them while keeping their secrets. The photographs grant privileged access but refuse to narrate.

The emotional undertow of Girl Pictures lies in its nuanced portrayal of female intimacies. I see in the photographs the familiar camaraderie of friendship, the comfort of touch, the tension of competition, the play of mimicry, the libidinal pull of desire. I like her, I want to be her, I want her, I mother her, I love her, I see her. Strands of attachment knit together in barely perceptible dramas. Boys make an occasional appearance in Girl Pictures. At best they can fix a car (Pop the Hood, 1998) or provide some sexual healing (Making Happy, 1998) in an abandoned one. More often, they function as objects of scorn in...