Between 1997 and 2002, photographer Justine Kurland hopped into her van and began taking long road trips through the Edenic countryside of the American West, staging photographs of teenage runaways who lived in communities on the fringes of cities and suburbs.
“I used photography to picture a space where female experience was foregrounded and affirmed through the mutual recognition of one another,” she explains on her website. This idyllic world, where young girls are able to build forts and campfires on the side-lines of urban life appears in her photographs as both beautiful and messy – a world of chaos where affection and freedom reign supreme. It is a teenage runaway narrative brought to life in 69 stunning images.
Kurland began this project shooting close to home, in and around the state of New Haven, but soon moved farther away, travelling afield and capturing the lives of girls wandering beneath highway overpasses and mucking around in drainage ditches. In 2018 she told the New York Times Styles magazine that “if the girls were running away, then it made sense that I should, too." It was in this spirit that she aimed to capture scenes of flight whilst she herself lived on the road: a semi-nomad photographing escapee.
Some of the photographs in this series, such as the 1999 ‘Pink Tree’, depict elements of solitude: a girl in a moment of reflection, a tree in full bloom, an almost empty highway. In others, community is at the foreground, with tens of girls talking and wandering away from any civilisation (such as in her 1998 ‘Golden Field’). But whether in community or in isolation, the girls depicted seem entirely distanced from the concerns of societal pressures and dynamics. On her website, the photographer describes the runaway narrative as “a short cut to establish the girls as outside the structures of domestic life and inside a world of their own making." Kurland thus implicitly transmits another message – an existence outside society is not only possible but plausible.
Living in a world where teenagehood is treated in many ways like a disease, one your parents hope goes away quickly and which society quietly hides away, these images serve as a refreshing change of pace. Performances of delinquency and caretaking become actual exchanges of intimacy and protection, and through this Kurland is able to portray the nuances of the inner lives of teenage girls. She focuses on small gestures. “For example," she explains in an interview, “in one picture, the girls play a guessing game where one traces a picture with her finger in the bare back of another, an act of sensual pleasure and communion.”
As a piece of work that cleverly straddles the line between fiction and the real world, these images seem at once a fantastical utopia and plausible reality. Inspired by the adventure stories in literature that so frequently centre around boys like Huckleberry Finn and Peter Pan, Kurland wanted to procure a female alternative, creating a kind of inverse of the American dream but with the same final promise: freedom.
In a 2020 Vanity Fair article, the photographer had a chance to look back at these images and reflect. Having quit the nomadic life that had fuelled her art for years in 2018, she looked back at these staged photographs, so deeply performative in their nature, and identified a shift in the meaning behind her work around the time of the 2016 election of Donald Trump. She stated that she no longer aimed to capture a fantastical reality but rather to look inwards, to figure out what was it she was running from. In stating she had become divorced from these images, they have gained a life of their own. Still, they retain the power of an artistic interpretation of the unknowable teenage girl spirit.
“A lot of art and writing exists in the contradictory space where it’s impossible to be what you’re presuming to be…but to imagine is to maybe get a little bit closer to it.”
– Kurland, Vanity Fair, 2020
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