By Suzanne Révy
A friend, who is a writer, invited me to join a group called “Morning Pages” back in March at the start of the lockdown. With a backdrop of pandemic and protests, I wake each morning to write in a stream-of-consciousness manner and it has proven to be a help in alleviating the stress of the past few months. Although it is the first time that I have maintained a regular ritual of writing, I have long maintained visual diaries with my camera. Over time, written and visual diaries provide catharsis, and can become powerful autobiographical statements for both author and audience. Two recently published books, Pleasant Street by Judith Black and Girl Pictures by Justine Kurland reveal divergent ways to keep a diary, recording the emotional experiences of life’s chapters over a span of time or through the breadth of place.
“Pleasant Street” (left) with photographs and text by Judith Black published by Stanley/Barker and “Girl Pictures”(right) with photographs and text by Justine Kurland, story by Rebecca Bengal published by Aperture (books photographed by Suzanne Révy)
In Pleasant Street, photographer Judith Black made portraits of herself, her four children, and her partner in the small Cambridge home they occupied during a twenty-year period from around 1980 to 2000. In contrast, Justine Kurland creates a sense of her own past by exploring a specific teenage sub-culture across a vast expanse of the American landscape. Her photographic fictions seem to spring from the pages of an imaginative teenager’s diary while Black’s pictures revere and revel in the ordinary day-to-day rituals of a growing family.
Judith Black “Dylan and Erik, February, 1980” from the book Pleasant Street (Stanley/Barker, 2020)
Judith Black “Laura and Johanna May 2, 1982” from the book Pleasant Street (Stanley/Barker 2020)
Black’s book opens with a self-portrait made at the age of 22 while pregnant with her first child, Laura in 1968. After a brief written introduction, we jump to roughly a decade later and Black’s chronological sequence of black and white photographs that guides the reader through three distinct periods: the first, a series of square format portraits made near a window that bathes the room in soft light, the second, a group of large format pictures (sometimes frozen with flash) that are posed, yet feel more restless, and the final third, tight portraits of her almost fully grown children. Together, Black’s even-handed, empathetic portraits present the arc of a family from the chaos of early childhood through the turbulent waters of the teen years. In some pictures, shadows of house plants dancing on the walls offer sub-text. In others, hints of adjacent spaces reveal both a sense of the frenetic and the moments of quiet that make up each day. The sequence is chronological, rhythmically punctuated by views of the house’s exterior and with the formal portraits of all four children together as they prepare to leave for annual vacations with their father. Black has said that these pictures serve to anchor her heart and hold dear her memories. But she is hardly alone in that. It is her unflinching, intelligent eye and her devoted attention to deep familial bonds that hit home with poignance and stirring transformational power.
Judith Black “Self with Kids, July 14th, 1984” from the book Pleasant Street (Stanley/Barker 2020)
Judith Black “Dylan and Laura, October, 1984” from the book Pleasant Street (Stanley/Barker, 2020)
Judith Black “Erik, December 25th, 1994” (left) and “Johanna December 25th, 1994” (right) from the book Pleasant Street (Stanley/Barker, 2020) (Book photograph by Suzanne Révy)
Justine Kurland “Toys R Us” from the book Girl Pictures, (Aperture, 2020.)
Like so many teens, Black’s children experimented with different hairstyles and make-up as they “tried on” new adult personas. Justine Kurland’s work is aimed squarely at this moment in life when we are anxious to flee the constraints of parents or high school and envision our independence. Inspired by the 80’s girl rock band “The Runaways” and after-school TV specials that ultimately glamorized the delinquent behavior they were meant to caution against, Kurland began making pictures of the teen daughter of a boyfriend. Together, they fantasized narratives of runways and scouted locations around New York City to make pictures. None of those pictures exist anymore, but Kurland expanded on the idea in the late nineties as she traveled around the country. Seeking out collaborators near schools or universities, they along with Kurland would create scenarios, find a place near the edge of town or in the no-man’s land under highways to play them out. The figures in many of the landscapes recall the 19th century paintings of the Hudson River School or European painters who embraced the aesthetics of the sublime. Indeed, the Rococo palette of the 18th century French painter Fragonard might be found in “Forest, 1998” with its filtered spring light illuminating a scene of nymphs attending their goddess. Kurland’s embrace of the overlooked landscape is heightened by her seductive use light and color which creates tensions between the idyllic figures among the ordinary brambles, and in one, a tension between the photographer and one of her rebellious subjects who gives us the finger.
“Forest, 1998” from the book Girl Pictures, photographs and text by ©Justine Kurland, story by Rebecca Bengal, published by Aperture, 2020. (Book photograph by Suzanne Révy)
“Finger, 2000” from the book Girl Pictures, photographs and text by Justine Kurland, story by Rebecca Bengal, published by Aperture, 2020. (Book photograph by Suzanne Révy)
Although the landscapes through the book are varied and the pictures captivating, there is a specificity to her models: young white girls whose ennui reveals a level of comfort in their lives that seems to emphasize the autobiographical nature of this book. Did Kurland select these collaborators because she saw something of herself and her own teen desires to break free and run away? It seems that with each picture, I have read the secret fantasies found in her locked diary.
Justine Kurland “Shipwrecked” from the book Girl Pictures (Aperture 2020)
Justine Kurland “Daisy Chain, 2000” from the book Girl Pictures, (Aperture 2020)
Both Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures and Judith Black’s Pleasant Street invite the viewer into a meaningful memoir. Kurland offers a white, middle-class, American teenaged-girl’s slice of colorful escapism. With pictures that criss-cross the country during the turn of the last century, we are meant to concur that the urge to run away is universal. On the other hand, Black’s Pleasant Street confines us to one spot. Her cramped, working-class, (also white) home and the same six individuals trace her household over two decades from 1980 to 2000. In contrast to Kurland’s mythological world, Black takes a deep dive into the reality of family bonds. Two layered visual diaries, so different.
Pleasant Street
Photographs and text by Judith Black
Published by Stanley/Barker, London 2020
https://www.stanleybarker.co.uk/collections/frontpage/products/pleasant-street
Girl Pictures
Photographs and text by Justine Kurland
Story by Rebecca Bengal
Published by Aperture, NYC 2020
https://aperture.org/shop/justine-kurland-girl-pictures/
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