Justine Kurland

Between 1997 and 2002, artist Justine Kurland took road trips around the fringes of cities and suburbs, meeting teenage girls and staging this series of photographs. The Girl Pictures as they are known imagine a community of run away’s living in their own way on the edge of society.

In the artist's words: “I used photography to picture a space where female experience was foregrounded and affirmed through the mutual recognition of one another. The teenage runaway narrative, borrowed from movies and literature, was a short cut to establish the girls outside the structures of domestic life and inside a world of their own making. We built forts and campfires, trespassed, ambled along riverbanks and beneath highway over- passes, where performances of delinquency and caretaking became actual exchanges of intimacy and protection. I intended for them to playact a state of communal bliss. As it turned out, the girls didn’t have to pretend. They jumped and half-skipped around each other each time we descended from the car and trekked into spaces of make-believe.”