Justine Kurland

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Justine Kurland (b. 1969 in New York City) is a fine art photographer, based in New York.

Kurland graduated from Yale University in 1998 with a Master of Fine Arts degree, after studying with Gregory Crewdson and Philip-Lorca diCorcia. 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 ([1]) 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.

Kurland's staged tableau work has a male parallel in the work of Anthony Goicolea.

[edit] Books & significant catalogues

Old Joy (Artspace, 2004) ISBN 1-891273-05-1
Justine Kurland: Spirit West (Coromandel, 2000)
Another Girl, Another Planet (Lawrence Rubin Greenberg / Van Doren Fine Art, 2001)