The 69 small color prints that make up Justine Kurland’s “Girl Pictures” series record an extended road trip that began in New Haven when the photographer was finishing up her MFA at Yale. The locations of these shots aren’t tourist destinations, though; for the most part, the settings are anonymous fields and woods, patches of desert and landfills, spots where the rural rubs against the urban to create a sun-bleached, tumbledown beauty. And in Kurland’s shots, these liminal spaces become backdrops for the misadventures of groups of adolescent girls, who seem—in their own in-between state—entirely at home in them.
Just beneath the everyday surface of these images glimmers an unexpected mythic quality; there’s a real gravity to what appear at first to be little more than records of idle teenage mischief. In one shot, a group gathers, stony-faced, to witness the burial of an armadillo; in another, two hitchhikers face down the headlights of an oncoming car, so vulnerable as to appear sacrificial. As with Kurland’s oeuvre in general, there’s an uncanny quality to such scenes, a tacit acknowledgement that the banal and the wild are coexistent, and that the cusp of adulthood marks a zone of dark magic.