Girl Pictures

Justine Kurland began Girl Pictures in 1997 and worked on the project for three years, traveling across the United States to photograph teenage girls in landscapes far from the suburban domesticity those girls were expected to inhabit. The pictures show girls camping, swimming, resting, building fires, and living outside in a world that is entirely theirs, shot in color with a warmth and stillness that owes something to the pastoral tradition while remaining firmly rooted in the late 1990s. Kurland's point of departure was the alienation she had felt as a teenager and a deliberate counter-image to the ways girls appear in mainstream photography: as subjects rather than agents of their own lives.

The book, with an introduction by Hilton Als, has become a reference point for subsequent photographers working with questions of girlhood, adolescence, and female community. This Aperture edition reproduces the full project for the first time in a single volume.