12 Point Buck,

2000

Kurland’s early photographs often focused on wanderers, outsiders, and adolescents, most of them female. In 12 Point Buck, the artist orchestrates a seemingly casual snapshot of two young runaways heading toward an unknown destination after a triumphant hunt. The vast autumnal wilderness evokes the history of landscape painting and photography of the American West, but Kurland’s version forgoes much of that tradition’s romantic idealism. With two protagonists who are neither heroic nor helpless, and a landscape that is neither pastoral nor sublime, Kurland sets a psychologically vexing scene fraught with ambivalence. The lauded 2003 exhibition Another Girl, Another Planet presented a cohort of women photographers, Justine Kurland among them, from the Yale School of Art who blurred the boundaries between staged and documentary photography. This exhibition, co-curated by photographer and Yale faculty member Gregory Crewdson, also signaled a new interest in women as both the subject and the object of photography.