"Of Woman Born"-- Justine Kurland
Kurland is able to get a Tennessee midwife to pose naked for her photographs, and go on record about it.



Meg Hayden, a midwife in Tennessee who has known Ms. Kurland since an early runaways shoot, said: “It’s not often that you get the chance to be outside and take your clothes off. In some ways it feels natural, but because it’s something you don’t get to do all the time, it is liberating. It is kind of a heightened reality.”

From what I've found, in this series depicts white women and children in natural settings. A utopian fantasy of tribal life.

Her mother lives on a Virginia farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near several back-to-the-land communes, and some of the women posing are her mother's friends.

Her process for finding models is fascinating-- she looks for women who respond to the romantic fantasy.



PERSUADING strangers to pose, often without their clothes, has never been a problem for Ms. Kurland. “I can always spot people,” she said. “It’s, like, really one of my superpowers. I can always tell which teenage girls would love living in the woods with their friends.”

Finding mothers was equally easy. “It’s like with teenagers,” she said. “You find one mom, and you get 10.”

She typically spends about three weeks in an area before a shoot, scouting locations and finding the right figures. She usually travels the same route, from New York to the Pacific Northwest and back, so may already have willing collaborators in a location.

If not, “I hang out in health food stores and playgrounds with a box of prints and talk to strangers, try to show them pictures, tell them what it’s about,” she said. “The ones who believe in the vision are the ones who come.”



Text in italics from/images via the NY Times.

As with nearly all the work I select to blog, my first reactions to this work were negative and uncomfortable. These photos got my back up. (There is a fourth photo from this series on the NYT site that I declined to post here because it has juvenile nudity.)

So I got to sit with my hostility to this work, and ponder it.

I think she does a amazing job making these lush utopian tableaus. She thoroughly exposes a certain romantic/essentialist strain of (feminist?) thought about women... these images put me instantly in touch with my own personal and political position vis-a-vis this romantic/essentialist fantasy.

I don't know if I am a fan of this work. I'm grateful I came across it especially during the gender studies.

I am personally unclear if an artist needs to be overtly critical in making works that so illustrate a compelling contemporary fantasy/ideology (and may serve as/collapse into a kind of propaganda for it), or if it is enough to illuminate that fantasy/ideology and let the viewer do the work of critical reception.

The latter presumes a viewer able to do that work of critical reception.

I know I depend on my audience to receive my work critically.