Justine Kurland review

Justine Kurland's presentation was one of the best lectures in the Ellen Johnson series that I have attended. Both the content of her work and the subject matter discussed were informative and interesting. I really liked how she started the lecture with an image from a fairy book that she read as a child. She said that this image really informed her whole aesthetic as an artist and having that image as a reference while looking at her work gave helpful insight into her image-making and the ideas that drive her. Hearing about her nomadic lifestyle was exciting and seeing such a noteworthy photographer speak was a rare treat.
Justine began her presentation with images that she made in graduate school, a series of staged photographs depicting female teenage runaways. She talked about how she struggled with the images being too surreal and wanted to move away from the fantastical aspect of 'inside the crystal egg'. She then went on to document people who live at various communes across America. These were my favorite images since they documented real people and lifestyles that are somewhat fantastical in their own right. Living on a commune is something I have fantazised about more than once and to see real documentation of this lifestyle was very interesting. Though Justine ended her runaway series to embark on more documentary projects, the work she is most famous for does have the same 'crystal egg' feeling as the runaway pictures, perhaps even more so. Kurland's photographs of naked women and children in the wilderness do not strike me as being deeply rooted in reality. They are beautiful and certainly evocative of the fairy tale image that she began her lecture with but I am not sure how they relate to her desire to step away from the realm of fantasy.
Justine mentioned wanting to make art about issues rather than beautiful imaginary pictures. As someone interested in photography I understand the impulse to strive towards art with a message and meaning and not to focus solely on aesthetics. However when Justine shared her story of camping with the gutterpunks and ultimately deciding that she did not like them and did not photograph them as planned, I inferred that perhaps documenting real situations is not always a photographic necessity and that there is nothing wrong with making beautiful and moving images that exist outside of a context of intended meaning.