FEATURE | PHOTOGRAPHY | NOSTALGIA
Written by Beth Torrance-Hetherington (she/they) | @beth.torrance | Contributing Writer
Upon first glance, Justine Kurland’s Orchard (1998) spells something idyllic. A field, a fruit tree with girls hanging from its boughs, all of which evoked nostalgia for cold waterholes, lilting breezes, dark purple of cool plums, crumbling bark and the sweaty crooks of limbs. Beneath the surface of its simple beauty, the photograph seemed to hold a simmering energy that gnawed at me. When I first laid eyes upon it, I ached to understand.
I learnt the photograph was a part of a series called Girl Pictures (1997-2002) by American photographer Justine Kurland. The blurb of her book reads:
She portrays the girls as fearless and free, tender and fierce. They hunt and explore, braid each other’s hair, and swim in sun-dappled watering holes [. . .] Their world is at once lawless and utopian, a frontier Eden in the wild spaces just outside of suburban infrastructure and ideas.
Orchard’s heady gaze, its rolling hills and white blossoms, appealed to my identity and experience living on the Thames Coast, waterlogged and rife with heartache. I instantly identified with the alternative mode of living Girl Pictures suggests, whereby women exist outside of men’s jurisdictions. The absence of men from the photos, and the solidarity and tenderness between the girls, implied something inherently queer that spoke to my own identity.
Growing up I spent summers on the Thames Coast at my grandfather’s beach house; it was surreal, then, to move there from Tāmaki Makaurau at age 14. Living in Thames, I embraced nature as a refuge in the face of loneliness that stemmed from my queer identity, general sense of otherness and a pretty harrowing romantic relationship, which largely defined my outlook in the context of living in Thames, and shaped me creatively as a person.
The coalescence of nature with the suburban in Girl Pictures speaks to my own occupation with these spaces as a teenager. I crawled through a water pipe and spilled onto the beach. I frequented empty skateparks; sat on roads to watch the sun set; balanced on a drainpipe overhanging a gushing culvert. I was drawn to the no man’s land quality of these spaces, something I think appeals to the adolescent sensibility. Claiming these spaces was a rejection of the conventional and a reaction to my position on the cusp of adulthood, with a sleeve caught in the teeth of childhood.
My connection to the whenua was inextricable from my evolving sense of self. I felt deeply attuned to the cycle of the seasons, as if they were an extension of my body and consciousness, or the body of my guitar resting in my lap. I think of the oak tree by my house, which in autumn dropped its leaves into a stream whose pools were home to native long-finned eels. I think of sitting on a rock in the pūkaki, the current tugging my feet away from me. I think of the macrocarpa leaning against the hillside, an eye on the glittering firth. I think of wandering down to the bay below, swathed in the smell of jasmine and salt. Here, I understood the essence of myself.
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