Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures captures teenage girls staging their own myths—blurring the line between freedom, rebellion, and collective imagination in the American margins.
In Girl Pictures, teenage girls roam liminal territories—underpasses, meadows, highwaysides—not as victims or symbols, but as protagonists in their own loose, feral mythology. Kurland’s project, born from road trips and real-time improvisation, conjures an alternate reality where girls evade domestic scripts, constructing micro-societies rooted in tenderness, mischief, and quiet rebellion.
Kurland’s subjects aren’t characters; they’re catalysts. Their presence animates the scenery with a particular kind of ghosted nostalgia—not for the 1990s, but for the rare moment when self-invention feels possible and ungoverned. The earliest images, like the portrait of Alyssum in a cherry tree, balance the visual grammar of cinematic escape with the banal details of the everyday. There’s always a sense that the world these girls are building hovers just out of reach, held together by shared glances and collective momentum.
What makes Girl Pictures particularly magnetic is its refusal to sentimentalize. These girls aren’t simply escaping—they’re enacting a quiet, anarchic rewriting of cultural tropes. In images like Boy Torture: Love, their gestures tease out a role reversal that feels both ironic and sincere. Even violence, or the performance of it, becomes a tool for subversion. The male gaze isn’t so much confronted as shrugged off, its power quietly reappropriated.
The spaces in these photographs—rural margins, industrial detritus, natural nooks—mirror the emotional terrain of the girls themselves. There is always something lurking at the edge of the frame, a reminder of the systems they’re skirting. But Kurland doesn’t dwell on threat. Instead, her camera lingers on community, on the thrill of being just beyond reach. The girls are both known and unknowable, familiar yet just out of focus, like a memory you're unsure you lived or just imagined.
