This Train Is Bound for Glory

by Raymond, Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9781616234881
• ISBN10: 1616234881
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-04-30
• Publisher: Distributed Art Pub Inc

Summary

For the past ten years I have lived alone, criss-crossing the United States in search of willing subjects to photograph," writes Justine Kurland (born 1969) in the introduction to her first collection in several years. Here, Kurland, internationally admired for her painterly photographs of female groups in Arcadian landscapes, explores and records the still-thriving subculture of the freight-hopping hobo. Her beautifully composed images of trains, train-jumpers and young refuseniks who exist far beyond workaday society, taken while journeying alongside them, allude to an American hobo narrative that harks back to the early days of the railroad, into the Great Depression and through the Vietnam War. Kurland's vision of this ongoing tradition is, gloriously, a utopian one: "We who are brave enough (or stupid enough) to become explorers today, when all available land has been conquered and occupied, can still be... the builders of a new world and a new consciousness." A signed and numbered limited edition, This Train is Bound for Glorypresents 50 color photographs that document her exploration of the modern steel lines that crisscross the American landscape, and the trails of the hobos who follow in the footsteps of such American folk heroes as Woody Guthrie, whose classic tune "This Train is Bound for Glory" includes the lines "Don't carry nothing but the righteous and the holy" and "She's streamlined and a midnight flyer."

Excerpts

"The legacy of American idealism is among the major subjects in the photography of Justine Kurland, who since the mid 90s has been arranging scenes in which the abstractions of principle--be it Freedom, Liberty, Community, what have you--sink down into the flesh and dirt of the everyday. From teenage girls caught up in group fantasias to pregnant women clustered in anticipation of maternal bliss to communitarians gathered to commemorate the brute endurance of their togetherness, Kurland's images capture not so much a given ideal as the process of ideals turning into shared practice, which is to say not so much Freedom as the interpretation of Freedom--or, in a sadder way, the illusion of Freedom.
Her most recent body of work takes as its subject that uber-American object of idealization, the train. Inspired in part by the obsession of her own young son, Casper, Kurland has spent the past several years exploring the nation's rail system as a symbol of promise and as an actual thing in the world, testing the romantic sentiments lyricized by Woody Guthrie and his beatnik followers against the vagaries of life in America today. How is the dream of the wind in your hair aging in America's third century?"

Jonathan Raymond, excerpted from This Train is Bound for Glory.