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Background information
The accordion volume 'This Train' from the US-American photographer Justine KURLAND presents two interwoven narratives drawn from the road trips across the United States that she undertook with her young child between the years 2005 and 2010.
Content
The first thread in the photo volume 'This Train' by Justine KURLAND is a sequence of arresting large-format photographs of her child and herself, disentangled from the renowned images of roads, trains, infrastructure, and fellow travelers she was making at the same time. Revisiting these photographs, she suggests a clarified reading of them as an anti-history of family and travel, upending the conventional family album to tell a story of queer motherhood and image-making in step with her maternal line, for whom crossing the American landscape was a matter of dire necessity.
On the other side of this unspooling concertina publication are her photographs of the railroads which traverse the American landscape. Deconstructing the familiar mythology of the railway as a pioneering symbol of modernity, these images observe the reality of the ways these routes carve and stain the landscape, often overwhelmed by surrounding nature, leaving behind barren strips of sun-stained asphalt and eerily perfect parallel tracks.
Bookended by new texts from Constance Debré and Lily Cho, the photographic volume 'This Train' by Justine KURLAND treats the American landscape as the fabricated tableau that it is, a cultural fable which conceals histories of Chinese migrant labor and the human cost of freedom. She re-appraises an interwoven set of paradigms which retain a tenacious grip on contemporary American life: the nuclear family, the open road, the violence of expansion, and the intractable force of the land itself." (© Mack books, 2024)
Additional information
The photo volume 'This Train' by Justine KURLAND comes as limited edition of 1,000 signed copies including a signed and numbered print handmade by the artist. Leporello bound hardcover, embossed with two flaps and tipped-in image to front cover. The measure of the handmade print is 20.3 x 16.4 cm.