JUSTINE KURLAND
Justine Kurland was born in 1969 in New York where she attended the School of Visual Arts and went on to attend Yale University after receiving her BFA. She specialises in staged photographs on the social landscape and how women are represented within a masculine world, often producing work based off an ideal female dominated utopia. Kurland would often go on road trips to take her images, exploring different layers of society and how people are represented within each. She has had her work exhibited in the MoMA in New York and in other galleries across the state, and internationally. These works include Girl Pictures, Role Models: Feminine Identity and SCUMB Manifesto.
SCUMB MANIFESTO
The title is a play on the S.C.U.M. manifesto, written by Valerie Links in 1967, which stands for: society for cutting up men. This was a radical feminist piece calling for women to: "overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex" and goes on to lay the blame on the male sex for being the cause of war, mental illness and preventing great art and culture. The manifesto is one of the inspiration's for Kurland's work as the B added to the end of the title makes the meaning of SCUMB Manifesto: society for cutting up men's books.
SCUMB Manifesto is made from around 150 photo-books made by straight, white men including the works of Lee Freidlander, Martin Parr and Alec Soth. The aim of this work was to criticise the systems in place that oppress woman and benefit men rather than target individuals however it was also mentioned that some of the photographers have been taking up too much of the spotlight for too long. Photography, especially photo-books, has been a male dominated medium for so long and Kurland's work redresses the imbalance and uses this as an act of repairing rather than destruction.
Each collage is cut up from a male artist's work and reorganised into powerful, often humorous images, and is named after the book it was taken from. It is symbolic of taking apart the patriarchy and restoring it without the lens in which males look on the world. They are presented on a range of different colour backgrounds and includes gatefolds for larger spreads. The book is 282 pages and was published in 2022
Nudes (second chance)
Nudes (second chance) is presented in the photobook as a poster which opens out and folds into four sections. This collage uses images from Lee Friedlander's book, Nudes, which is a collection on images of models photographed in their home. He took the photos using flash in order to capture all the detail on the subjects body and define the outline of each. This method of photographing a subject could be seen as invasive and making the work through the lens of the male gaze.
This could be why Kurland has made the body parts into the shape of an eye to represent the harsh gaze in which the women were objectified and looked under. Furthermore, how the bodies overlap more and more and become smaller as it works its way into the centre of the image, the pupil, creates a sense of depth making it appear to have three-dimensional qualities. This could be to represent how deep the male gaze permeates society and links back to the ideals in the S.C.U.M. manifesto that the patriarchy is too rooted to be fixed so instead needs eradicating completely to be truly free of it. The folds in the poster lead to the centre of the image which draws attention to the fact that the pupil is the middle and therefore that the image resembles an eye.
Including many parts of different people's bodies is interesting as each fragment belonged to an individual and therefore represents the individual lived experiences, personalities and opinions that formed the person it is taken from. However, the fact that all the parts have been constructed to form one overall image, the eye, strips this individuality from each person as they become merged into one. This reflects how women are viewed under the male gaze as they are just objectified and viewed for their physical features rather than the personal qualities that make a human.
I like this idea of using fragmented body parts to remove identity and show how everyone can just blur into a collective however in my work I would not look at this in terms of sexism, but in terms of detachment from groups of people and how it can feel to have many people in your life but not feeling attached to a person's sense of individuality as you yourself are not deeply involved with your own reality. I want to use this technique but instead of forming an eye, I want to try to make a kaleidoscopic image to show the changing of people in and out of life and how they can blur into one whole image if you are not feeling connected in reality enough.
I used images I have previously taken and used the object selection tool to select a body part from the image and copy and paste it onto a blank page. I would paste the item multiple times and not alter them so that all the pieces were uniform and of the same size to make it as close to symmetrical as possible. I only used three images to make my collage: an arm, a leg and an eye.
I think the collage does work well in conveying the idea of viewing people but not seeing them as a whole but just fragments at a time. The position of the arms makes it seem as if they are waving which is used to convey the feeling of many people you know greeting you and walking by but it feels very surreal as it feels fake.
I wanted to emulate the depth that Kurland achieved in the collage above and I believe that I have done this successfully through the angle that the leg was taken at with the top half closer to the camera and the foot further away. This makes it seem as if the legs are stepping into the eye in the middle and the arms act as an outline off of which the legs hang down off. I also like the shadow cast by the legs as it makes it seem as if the viewer's eyes are lagging behind the movement of the legs and makes it appear as if they are moving around the eye. However, it is potentially too simple and I would like to make it more like a kaleidoscope with smaller fragments added between the frame I already have to add to the idea of a person being jumbled up in the mind.
