An unconventional portrait of queer motherhood

Dur­ing the late 1990s, Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­ph­er Jus­tine Kur­land hit the road in a camper van and set forth on a jour­ney to cre­ate the ground­break­ing series, Girl Pic­tures. Deft­ly sub­vert­ing hyper­mas­cu­line tropes of the rugged indi­vid­u­al­ist forg­ing a new world in the wild fron­tier, she staged lumi­nous scenes of teen girls embrac­ing col­lec­tivism to live togeth­er in har­mo­ny with nature. 

“I have always been drawn to the way pho­tog­ra­phy lies and tells the truth,” Kur­land says. ​“It can nev­er real­ly be a metaphor or a sym­bol because it is always the fact of what is front of the cam­era. So every staged pic­ture is only ever the yearn­ing for and the imag­in­ing of alter­na­tive modes of being. In this way its an impor­tant polit­i­cal tool because noth­ing can change if we can’t visu­alise what that looks like.”

When she became a moth­er, Kur­land con­tin­ued along her path, envelop­ing her son Casper in the flu­id inti­ma­cy of her migra­to­ry life. Between 2005 and 2010, they trav­eled the coun­try, fol­low­ing the sea­sons in order to bask in the sun’s suc­cu­lent rays for as long as possible.

For Kur­land, life on the road was a fam­i­ly affair, with its roots embed­ded in her own child­hood. ​“My moth­er made hand craft­ed cloth­ing and sold them at Renais­sance Fairs up and down the east coast to sup­port us,” she says. ​“My sib­lings and I trav­eled with her, camp­ing on site, and lat­er worked for her. I inher­it­ed cer­tain types of knowl­edge from her: how to get by in a nomadic mode, how to build out a live­able van and how to raise chil­dren as an exten­sion of a fam­i­ly business.”

With the new book, This Train (MACK), Kur­land deft­ly weaves togeth­er large for­mat pho­tographs of moth­er and child with sweep­ing vis­tas of roads, infra­struc­ture, and trains vio­lent­ly carved out in the majes­tic land­scape, explod­ing the hero­ic mythos shroud­ing the bru­tal his­to­ries inscribed in the earth.

“Every ide­al has a shad­ow side. I pho­tographed the trains because my son loved them and I want­ed to be in sync with his enthu­si­asms,” Kur­land says. ​“But in pho­tograph­ing the trains I also pho­tographed vio­lent his­to­ries embed­ded in their right of way: the geno­cide of indige­nous peo­ple as ear­ly migrants pushed vio­lent­ly west­ward, the car­bon emis­sions from the first steam engines that mark the on set of the Anthro­pocene, and the ghosts of the thou­sands of Asian-Amer­i­can labour­ers that laid the tract and died because of unsafe work­ing con­di­tions, dis­ease or sui­cide at the same time their rights to cit­i­zen­ship was barred by US law in the first race based anti-immi­gra­tion policies.”

As with Girl Pic­tures, Kurland’s fab­ri­cat­ed tableaux cre­ate a counter-nar­ra­tive brim­ming with pos­si­bil­i­ties untold. ​“I wouldn’t call me pic­tures utopic because they are pos­si­ble,” she says.

“I use pho­tog­ra­phy to imag­ine oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties that counter the harm­ful effects of patri­archy, cap­i­tal­ism, and impe­r­i­al modes of dom­i­na­tion,” Kur­land con­tin­ues. ​“The pho­tographs in This Train are dear to me not sim­ply because it’s me and my son, but because it asserts the legit­i­ma­cy of non-nor­ma­tive of fam­i­ly life and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of shift­ing modes of val­ue and meaning.”

This Train (2024) by Jus­tine Kur­land is pub­lished by MACK and avail­able now.

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