In photographs as with collage, I’ve tried to imagine a habitable world for women. Justine Kurland: I wouldn’t characterize my work as intellectual. How does this intellectual project differ from your previous work? While womanhood has long been at the center of her images, their obvious absence in SCUMB Manifesto raises bold inquiries about photography-who are the characters and who are the authors? In her resuturing, a further inquiry: who has authority? Kurland joins Document to discuss collage as a feminist strategy, the inevitable extinction of male monopoly on power, and creating a new reverence for female artists.Īvery Norman: Since the ’90s, you have touched on themes of freedom and the feminine identity through your photographs. Known for her staged, documentary photographs like those in Girl Pictures, Kurland has long aimed her lens on young women in transition. This new deconstructive approach is itself a radical departure from Kurland’s photographic process. Cutting up and collaging images taken by canonized figures of photography is a symbolic act of dismembering the patriarchy by making room for women photographers who have been denied such veneration. “The point of these collages is to annihilate the influence of these men who were introduced to me through my schooling and reinforced by museums, galleries, and publications,” Kurland says of her recent work. With Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books, Kurland evokes Solanas’s dream matriarchal utopia by physically clearing out her personal library of photography books by male artists. Justine Kurland’s new project, SCUMB Manifesto, which is currently showing at Higher Pictures Generation, employs Solanas’s idea as the basis for further development. The altercation increased the general public’s interest in and awareness of the manifesto, which called for the total eradication of the male sex and summoned “civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females” to join her coalition, The Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM). Two bullets ruptured Warhol’s stomach, spleen, liver, esophagus, and both lungs, but doctors were able to save him. Solanas, a fringe radical feminist and revolutionary writer, gained notoriety in 1968 when she shot Andy Warhol at the Factory a year later. On the streets of Greenwich Village in 1967, Valerie Solanas began selling copies of her self-published SCUM Manifesto, charging women $1 and men $2.

Inspired by Valerie Solanas, the photographer's latest project slices away the influence of male artistic 'geniuses' to make room for women in the canon

The scum manifesto