The art of rebellion: Justine Kurland’s utopian photography

For Justine Kurland, utopia is never a destination but a practice – a way of reimagining inherited worlds. In this video by the Museum of Modern Art, she traces how that practice has evolved over three decades. Best known for her photography, Kurland has reframed the American landscape through images of adolescent girls, mothers and outsider communities, where gestures of autonomy and care offer alternatives to the usual narratives of domination. Her more recent work, collected in the book SCUMB Manifesto (2022) – for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books’ – takes a blade to the photography books in her personal library by canonical, mostly male photographers, including her former Yale teacher Gregory Crewdson, and reassembles the fragments into new constellations. Through these acts of destruction and repair, Kurland opens space for fresh ways of seeing, continuing a feminist tradition of imagining worlds beyond conventional frames.