

Justine Kurland: It’s really retarded how I do it, because there are lots of rail fans who have these radio wave things, and you can plug in and listen to the dispatchers, and know when the trains are coming. But I never did any of that. There was something about just going and waiting. I feel like everything I do is counterintuitive, antiproductive. I don’t check the train schedules. I don’t have one of those radios. I remember this one time we were waiting, and Casper insisted that he needed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so I had to go back to the car and make it, and when I’m at the car, of course that’s when the train comes. I was really mad and I was yelling at him and I said, “You know, Jeff Wall does not have to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the middle of his photo shoots.”In the book, you wondered what Brice Marden’s paintings would look like if he had painted with a child on his hip. It’s a legitimate question. Women have so many different roles to play. If you’re a mother and you’re an artist, you’re thought of as two things, and which is primary? But male artists are always artists first.
Exactly. It’s tricky because maybe you shouldn’t even say that raising children is such a female experience, but I just don’t know any men who feel it as deeply, but then why isn’t that relevant to their work? Art is supposed to be about this kind of intensified experience of life. Drug addiction puts you on the edge and propels you into this raw or more liberated state. And that is totally what raising kids does to you, too. You’re getting your heart broken every second. Everything becomes dramatic. Everything becomes heightened, and the range of experience becomes so much greater. Your heart is so much more open. All of those things that we think of when we think about what the artist’s experience is are embodied in this idea of having children, but still, it has historically been a women’s experience. I remember when I did the mama pictures [Of Woman Born], and I was like, wow, I’m really gonna get slammed, and I had this conversation with Jay Gorney, and he’s always been really supportive of my work—there’s always this money issue ‘cause I’m always, always broke—but he was like, “You know, Justine, I don’t know who’s gonna buy these pictures because women don’t like women and men don’t like women.” [laughs] He was like, “Hopefully some lesbians will come around.”
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Aw!In photographing other women, particularly girls, you’ve explored more fully what that period of late girlhood looks like and you’ve also reinvented what it looks like as the subject of a photograph. So what does it mean that this new body of work mainly depicts men?
Well, it’s interesting. The whole project came though Casper, because he became really obsessed with trains. Trains are really a male-dominated field: All the rail fans are men, and train riders are predominantly men. My father got diagnosed with cancer right at the time that those train pictures came out, and it had been really hard for me to find out that I was having a boy child and not a girl child, so maybe there’s something cathartic in the work. And then it was also the time that my relationship with Casper’s father had fallen apart. It was like there was a kind of weird attention on men in my life.I have to back up a little bit. It’s not like I’m studying gender. I mean, I’m a feminist, and my work is feminist. But I think it was more about being a mom, and I’m the mom of a boy, and this is his boy world with trains that I was delving into. I feel that the nominal subject matter of this body of work is trains, landscapes, hobos, marginalized populations. The subject matter really comes back to just a very subjective moment of, like, okay, I’m bringing my kid on the road, and I have to make it fun for him, I have to incorporate who he is into it. And then I found my own way through it.
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When we first did it, I didn’t even think of photographing hobos. I was just thinking about trains. Casper actually doesn’t like hobos at all. He thinks the whole idea of a rider on a train is disturbing, because it ruins the perfect square after square after square after square. It’s very streamlined for him. But I remembered looking at all these James Welling pictures and thinking about how his work is so much about the self-reflexive moments of a photographer that it’s almost as if the train in his photograph disappears and it becomes a photograph of nothing in a way, because it’s impossible to make a new picture of a train. They’re just like the most banal symbol of America.So I was interested in the idea of this clichéd American iconography of the West. I just started going around to these spots and meeting rail fans and learning more about the history of this train merging with this company, and thinking about the whole idea of how the West was won. And it was really pretty slowly that I started thinking about hobos, but it was in this way I do of everything becoming very subjective and not work. I’m not a documentarian. I’m not a hardcore landscape artist. I record something about the American landscape, but it’s subjective, and this idea was like my own kind of gypsy American nomadic thing.

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Well, the portraits are staged the way any portrait would be. Like, OK, stand over there, a little to the right, a little to the left. But I’m shooting all of this with a 4 x 5 camera, which has a big setup. You know, once you focus the camera, you can’t have anyone move out of the plane of focus. It’s a very slow process. It’s about waiting for the right moment. There is a theatrical distance from the narrative so that there’s more of a questioning, and in that way there is a play—that I think my work has always had—between reality and a kind of fantasy realm or extrapolation of a fantasy or a romantic idea of life. There’s something mystic about these kids, these train riders, something about American folklore that’s able to play out because it is not a specific narrative with my hand directing any kind of actual event.
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That book was really kind of bizarre for me to read, because I had been photographing the hobos and was thinking about my inability to penetrate their culture and how I’m not photographing as a documentarian. They had become a kind of ideal for me, an abstraction. Then when I read that book, it was so weird that he was talking about train riders in the exact way that I had been thinking about them. And his whole thing about “Big Rock Candy Mountain”—the idea that it doesn’t matter where you go, it’s always gonna be better–that the idea of travel is about this kind of prayer, that really struck a chord with me.
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It seemed clear to me early on that one of the things a photograph could do was make a reality, and I wanted to do that. I always think of looking inside an Easter egg and seeing a perfect world. I remember making those runaway girl pictures and then 9/11 happened, and I think everyone just had a wake-up call, and here we were as Americans living in this boom without any kind of external awareness. I had to ask myself what I was doing as an artist and as a human being, what kind of responsibility I had. And that’s when I did those portraits of communes. I was like OK, I’m gonna be more political in my work. I can’t just keep making it perfect. And I’m doing it with the work that I’m making now: We’ve been on the road now for five months, and I’m still photographing train riders, but I’m expanding it to include a larger group of American nomads and travelers. There are a lot of homeless people that I’ve been hanging around, and I have to think about how exploitative this work is and what does it mean to make pictures of someone that you then put in an art gallery as a luxury product. Ultimately I think that it’s not the artist who should be the upholder of moral responsibility, but then I think it’s a personal responsibility to be a moral person.
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With Casper, there’s this whole other chapter that I haven’t even talked about, what it meant to make this choice of raising him on the road. Last fall, I had a show of this work, and I was like, OK, this body of work is over. It was right at the time that Casper was supposed to go to kindergarten, and I was like, OK, I have to get off the road and let my kid have a normal childhood. He started kindergarten. He was doing fine, and, God, it was great not to have to talk about, like, combustion engines or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. But I got really depressed being stuck in New York, and it seemed like a prison sentence stretching before both me and Casper: the institutionalization of his childhood through the public school system, and my enslavement of being stuck in one place. I just got really depressed and went to therapy and was like, “Fuck! What am I gonna do?” And the guy was like, “You know, if you really want to be on the road and Casper wants to be on the road, you should go.” So I did. I know he’s getting an amazing life, but I don’t know that I picked the right choice as a mother. I picked the right choice as an artist. Which hopefully turns into the right choice as a mother. I’m making everyone suffer for my art. It better be worth it, you know. Better be an enriching experience for him. There is the whole idea of parenting on the road, and about seeing everything through Casper’s eyes, and about Casper’s collaboration in whatever it is that we’re photographing.I liked the story about one of the bulls telling you, “It’s a crying shame you don’t cut that boy’s hair.”
[Laughs] Another time, when Casper was probably three years old, we’d found a little lake beach on the road. I didn’t know anyone there, and we were playing on the beach and he started playing with a little girl, and they were making sand castles and filling up their moat with water, and eventually Casper’s pants got wet, so he just took them off, and the little girl looked over at him and said, “Ewww! Mommy! That little girl has a penis!”All images courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & NashNICOLE RUDICK