Salon #56 — Justine Kurland, Laura Larson

Join us for an in-person salon with photographers Justine Kurland and Laura Larson.

Inspired by Valerie Solanas’ iconoclastic feminist tract SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, SCUMB Manifesto (MACK, 2022) introduces us to photographer Justine Kurland’s uncompromising initiative: the Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books. This volume presents collages Kurland created by cutting up and reconfiguring photobooks by male artists as she went through the process of purging her own library of books by straight white men that have monopolized the photographic canon. Her ritual is restorative and loving: each work is a reclamation of history, a dismemberment of the patriarchy, a gender inversion of the usual terms of possession, and a modest attempt at offsetting a life of income disparity. Kurland is known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and their fringe communities—these compositions are a continuation of her ongoing project of creating space for women.

Justine Kurland (@justine4good) studied photography at the School of Visual Arts and Yale University. Recent monographs include Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (Aperture, 2020) and The Stick (TIS, 2021).

City of Incurable Women (Saint Lucy Books, 2022) pictures the complex lives of 19th-century women, diagnosed as suffering from hysteria, who were hospitalized at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Incorporating a broad range of materials, Laura Larson‘s second book layers archival imagery with her own photographs and texts, speculating through the documented accounts of the women’s illness. She imagines the women as a collective, making a claim for their shared knowledge and the pleasures and risks of escape. Embracing photography’s capacity to feel, City of Incurable Women sees these women as unruly spirits that haunt the present, mining the radical possibilities of empathy and resistance.

Laura Larson (@laura_larson_studio) is a photographer and writer based in Columbus. Her first book, Hidden Mother (Saint Lucy Books, 2017), was shortlisted for the Aperture-Paris Photo First Photobook Prize.