The call of the wild girls

By LINDA HERRICK

New York photographer Justine Kurland is a myth-maker. She creates a skew-whiff world, casting young girls as hardy runaways in a self-sufficient utopia.

Her photos look super-real but they are fantasies, teens posing under Kurland's instructions: "This is the world, you're running away, you live in trees, you eat nectar, you torture boys and you're a little bit mean."

Kurland, a 33-year-old master of fine arts Yale graduate, is fascinated with creating a fictive relationship between an imagined adolescence and a frontier-type environment. Some typical locations are American quarries or marshes, but last year she came to New Zealand for two months and found a new world altogether; a world she has created for an exhibition which opens at Artspace today.

Kurland has returned for the show, which is a starting point for a forum at the gallery on photographs of women and the landscape on Wednesday at 6pm. "A picture for women - fictions in the landscape" is chaired by Fiona Pardington. The panel includes photographers Fiona Amundsen, Greta Anderson, Lisa Crowley and Ann Shelton

Her first time working out of the United States, Kurland found new models through pupils at St Cuthbert's College and Auckland Girls' Grammar and, via this email discussion, notes the New Zealand landscape and the reaction of the girls prompted a new approach.

LH: When you came to New Zealand in 2001, did you know you would have to make adjustments to accommodate the landscape and the colonial history?

JK: I knew my photographs were very American, both in their specific narratives in the way they drew on a landscape tradition about an endless expanse of land that had always accommodated the projection of a frontier utopia, always just ahead. My method of working did not change dramatically in New Zealand - I was still looking at the landscape and the history of a region for narrative clues, then asked the girls to enact their version.

LH: Did you know much about either the landscape or the history before you came?

JK: I started researching a few months before I came. Anne Salmond's Two Worlds was a crucial resource, but these narratives are largely intuitive and circumstantial.

The girls in these photos have left home and come together like wildlife, forming packs. They run along the jagged beaches, their eyes on the horizon, the uniforms they wear either a relic of a lost civilisation or a symbol of their newly founded solidarity.

LH: How do you work with "your" girls in the States?

JK: It varies; in some cases I meet the girls just days or hours before the shoot. Part of my process has been the road trip, in which the girls and the landscape are discovered as I arrive. That keeps the directorial mode in check - the uncertainty of what I'll find saves me from myself.

In some cases where I do return and photograph the same girls, I develop a certain intimacy, but it is not essential to my process. Some girls you can know for years without ever really knowing them. Either way, the second the shutter releases, the girls are in collaboration.

LH: How did the Auckland school "recruits" react to the experience?

JK: I normally wouldn't go through a school; mostly because it wouldn't be allowed in the US, which is a country of lawsuits. If a school there allowed me to enter the building soliciting models, they would be liable; the parents would sue the school if one of the girls fell over and scraped her knee.

The difference between American and New Zealand girls is huge. American girls are much more media-savvy and consciously play the role of the "teenage girl". In New Zealand the girls seemed less aware of me, they became completely lost in the activities I suggested, and the line between me as an adult and them as children was more defined. I found the process of documenting their performances much more real.

LH: Why are they in uniform?

JK: It functions as a symbol for the world of laws and adults; it provides a stark contrast to the wilderness, alluding to a world they have left behind. The uniforms also unite them, like soldiers.

LH: Are your girls malevolent or benevolent?

JK: The world I'm drawing is amoral. I believe good exists beside bad and the more this is suppressed and denied, the more evil can foster. I don't imagine these girls as malevolent, although there is something menacing about large groups.

LH: Why do you exclude boys from your tableaux?

JK: I don't know. I guess I was never as interested in them.

* Justine Kurland, Artspace, from today until November 16.