Justine Kurland, “This Train Is Bound for Glory”

Justine Kurland’s new photographs depict an American West crisscrossed by railroads and peopled by hoboes, hippies and angelic children. Counting Hoppers, for instance, shows a blond toddler perched on a boulder, looking across a river at a row of freight cars that stretches along the base of a majestic, rocky cliff. A bearded musician in Land of the Lost plays the fiddle in a redwood grove, backpack at the ready. In Hemp Bracelet for Spanging, a reclining youth gazes up from a mossy log in the rainforest while his girlfriend braids cords held between her knees.

These reveries suggest narratives of innocence and freedom, as well as particularly American myths of nomadic restlessness and living off the grid. Yet, while they are staged, Kurland’s idylls aren’t entirely fictional: She spent much of her time traveling with her son in the van seen in several shots, searching out the places and people she both idealizes and documents.

For all the quixotic beauty of these images, however, Kurland’s landscapes may even more affectingly envision America. The train in Magic Hour passes through wooded hills, half in shadow, half in sunlight, a stream at the lower right reflecting gold. In Keddie Wye, two sets of curving tracks on trestles converge at the bottom of the picture, framed by pine boughs that glisten with moisture from the fog rolling in. Limpid and luminous, the scene feels all the more poignant because it is real, and accessible to those who seek it.—Joseph R. Wolin

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