For the past ten years, photographer Justine Kurland has been on the road, crisscrossing the United States in search of willing subjects to photograph. She is known for photographing people in American wilderness landscapes. The images that she previously exhibited were the illustration of a personal fantasy, groups of nude women and children living together in harmony with nature, 21st century photos reminding us of 19th century paintings.
“My work exists as an extension of the 19th century landscape tradition of picturing a perfect place. The photographs I make are narratives gleaned from America’s dream of itself, a collective identity based on a firm faith in manifest destiny and our inalienable rights. These images are portals into the not quite real, not quite fictional realm of the American frontier. In this space I create documents of disappearance—disappearing landscapes, disappearing cultures, disappearing possibilities”.
Her new project is different all together, “more like hunting ghosts”: It documents the vanishing lifestyle of the hobo, a search that she says doesn’t come from inspiration but desperation.
“As a longstanding traveler, wanderer, and seeker in my own right, I see myself reflected in the marginalized hobo population. We who are brave enough or stupid enough to become explorers today, when all available space has been conquered and occupied, are still, I believe, the builders of the new world and a new consciousness. The American frontier may have been settled, but the country is, in another sense, being unsettled rapidly. The first steam engines shaped the landscape both literally and otherwise; now they are rusty arteries radiating from the post-capitalist heart of the world, running shipping containers from China to Wal-Marts across the country. The images I make possess a sense of prophecy and attempt to collapse time, and because of these qualities, the figures they depict have been described as ghosts. If so, the contemporary hobos in my new body of work - who in their very existence represent a collapse of time, and the potential of collapse that lies within modernity - may be the harbingers of rematerializing forces and class conjured by shifts in the global economy. I made portraits of fellow travelers as [my son] Casper sang to us in melodies borrowed from Woody Guthrie. I pointed my camera towards history and at the same time recorded my growing son as he collected ladybugs from the fennel beside the tracks. The resulting photographs are portals into the realm of railroad folklore. I still am picturing the world I want to be but now more from searching and wishing and trying again and again than by staging. The trajectory of my work has been to allow more and more of the real in”.
