SUNDAY, MAY 30, 2010
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A boy’s fascination becomes an artist’s triumph
kurland from E1
vors train-themed T-shirts, bare legs and, until rather recently, dis- posable diapers. He is 5. “It’s getting to the point where I live on the road,” says the elder Kurland, speaking from their lat- est stop, in Santa Cruz, Calif. (She says a friend is keeping Casper busy in a nearby restaurant; he lasts almost an hour before Mom has to end the interview. ) The pair have been on the go since late De- cember, when they once again left behind their tiny apartment on New York’s Lower East Side — bathtub in the hot-plate kitchen; red-painted wood floors; make- shift shelves bulging with photo books and supplies — in favor of a live-in van and open skies. “He’s just psyched to be with me,” says Kurland. “. . . Casper lives in the moment.” Starting from before he was 2,
Casper’s moments — every waking one of them — simply had to in- clude trains. The van was full of boxes of toy trains; wherever the pair traveled, they had to look for the real things. “I can’t even de- scribe the intensity of his interest,” Kurland says. She checked train books and Web sites that told them where to spot which kind of rolling stock. At that time, Kurland was still working solo, you could say, mak- ing the fine-art photos that had first won her recognition. Right out of grad school at Yale in 1998, she’d become known for staged photos of women and girls, often naked, set in various versions of the American landscape. This wasn’t babes-in-nature cheese- cake. The pictures she showed, in a now-famous group show called “Another Girl, Another Planet,” were of female toughs having ad- ventures in exurban woods — “re- verse-gender Huckleberry Finns,” as one critic put it. Later pictures presented a full-blown Arcadian fiction of an all-female society in touch with the planet. That fiction was romantic, but it was also so obviously staged that it didn’t read entirely straight-faced. The photos were about trying the fiction on for size rather than fully buying into it.
Photos unstaged
Susan Fisher Sterling, director of the National Museum of Wom- en in the Arts, says Kurland was “one of the key younger artists” in a show called “Role Models: Femi- nine Identity in Contemporary American Photography,” staged at the museum in 2008. Sterling now keeps a Kurland poster on her of- fice wall, and her institution took in 14 Kurland originals in its latest round of acquisitions, to add to the four it already owned. Sterling says she likes the “hopeful or win- some character” she finds in Kur- land’s photos. “You feel a bit of angst, but you always feel there’s a bit of potential for the women in her works.” Kathryn Wat, curator of modern and contemporary art at Women in the Arts, likes the photos’ emo- tional directness: “She’s really pre- senting something that’s dear to her heart. For me, that’s very mov- ing, and quite rare in the contem- porary art world today.” The girls and women in Kur-
land’s work may have been dropped into their natural settings by the artist, but they seem to be playing themselves rather than fictional characters. They aren’t professional actors or models; they were volunteers Kurland found during the road trips she started taking before Casper was born. “I would just show up in a town and trawl for girls,” she says. Her subjects’ alternative lifestyles were often not that far from the roles they took on in her photos. In one series of photographs from the early 2000s, Kurland
ican nomads,” as she describes the people she’s photographed. One of her subjects was Cuervo, who used to ride the rails but switched to walking the West with his three burros, dog and tame wolf. There was also Train Doc, a legendary hobo who spends half the year on the trains and half as a nurse in Minnesota. Other subjects were the beggar
COURTESY OF JUSTINE KURLAND
MINI MODEL: “Posing for a Piece of White Chocolate,” 2008.
ditions of rail photography,” Kur- land says. Instead of making her trains look gleaming and impres- sive — symbols of triumphant know-how — she mostly chose flat light and distant viewpoints that made them look like inescapable facts of the landscape. She realized that trains, and the people who build their lives around them, are
caught up in the romance of the American utopia she’d been deal- ing with for years: “It’s about fun- damental ideas of freedom.” Carting along her son and her big 4x5 camera, with its heavy tri- pod and stacks of sheet film, Kur- land has climbed mountains and braved railyard guards to follow and document her “Gypsy Amer-
kids, tattooed and pierced, who “become very fetishistic about train riding.” (Apparently they have contempt for city-dwelling street kids, calling them “home bums.”) Kurland discovers them trackside when they’re waiting for the next train or have just tumbled out of one. Her photos capture the romance of their life on the rails. Her photos also balance that ro- mance with doubts about the worth of its cliches. With Casper in tow, Kurland herself doesn’t risk jumping trains. After all, he has become her crucial collaborator and possibly her most important model. Kur- land’s pictures of Casper in the landscape — drinking juice beside a river, peeing in a forest, playing with toy trains as a real one rolls along nearby — have brought her art to a new place. Instead of building and peopling an imagi- nary utopia, Kurland now makes photos that show her building a reality that, if not a perfect idyll, seems a decent place to live. As Casper has helped her recognize, it’s full of interesting stuff. Kurland’s work has always been about the “ghost of America,” she says. “But I’m looking for it. I’m not staging it anymore.”
gopnikb@washpost.com
MORE PHOTOS View Justine Kurland’s captivating portfolio at
washingtonpost.com/style.
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HELAYNE SEIDMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
AT HOME: Justine Kurland and son Casper in their Lower East Side apartment: “It’s getting to the point where I live on the road.”
pushed further toward the docu- mentary. She shot her male and female subjects “straight,” in the communes they were still living in as the last descendants of 1960s utopians. The twin towers had just come down, she says, “so it made sense for me to find people who were really trying to change the world.”
The Gypsy thing
Kurland says she grew up in the orbit of such people. Her father was a painter but took off when she was 3. Her mother, who now lives near the commune of some friends in Roanoke, trained to be an artist but fed her three daugh- ters by sewing period clothes for Renaissance fairs all over. The kids would be pulled from school at fair time, so Kurland feels “the Gypsy thing” comes from her mom. Kurland was raised in Up- state New York but had run away
“If I was going to schlep him across the country, it seemed only fair” to follow Casper’s passion.
to be an artist in Manhattan by the time she was 15: “This aunt took me in like a stray.” In photos exhibited in 2007,
Kurland undressed mothers and their babies (“my mom was always naked”) and photographed them in the woods and by the sea, as they might have looked 100,000 years ago. “I made these pictures of mothers that made me want to be a mother,” Kurland says. She ac- knowledges that Casper’s “baby daddy,” the sculptor Corey McCor- kle, helped her achieve that goal, but she says that he was closely in- volved in parenting only at the be- ginning. More recently, it’s mostly been just mother and child and van.
“My expenses are low, so I don’t
have to get a job,” Kurland says. She supports the family (and her $10,000-a-year film habit — she refuses to go digital) on sales and one-semester teaching gigs at Yale and other schools.
Capturing railway life
So there she was, in the van, touring and making more of her staged “woman” pictures, when she decided that she owed it to her son to try to turn his railway inter- ests into art. “If I was going to schlep him across the country, it seemed only fair.” Trains are plenty photographed, so the challenge was to find some unique, personal way to depict them. “I always subverted the tra-
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