SCUMB Manifesto
Justine Kurland
There can be no mistake about the message that photographer Justine Kurland is sending with her latest book SCUMB Manifesto. She lays it all out on the cover in bold all-caps letters. It’s by far the angriest element of the book. The text on the front cover draws on Valerie Solanas’s ferociously combative and accusatory prose style in her SCUM Manifesto to stick it to the partiarchy.
Valerie Solanas is famous for two things: shooting Andy Warhol and writing the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto in 1967. Perhaps the most wilfully outrageous radical feminist polemic. The manifesto gained its initial notority after Solanas’s attempted assassination of Andy Warhol on 3 June 1968.
This new book from Justine Kurland, titled SCUMB Manifesto, is riffing on Valerie Solanas’s feministic broadside. In Kurland’s case men’s books are being cut up. So a silent B is added to get SCUMB (Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books).
SCUMB Manifesto is a series of collages that Kurland made from her personal library of photobooks. She dismembered and reconfigured images from around 150 photobooks by straight white male photographers to create her collages. Including perhaps the most famous photobook of all time: The Americans. Each collage is named after the book that provided the raw material for it, but does not refer to the photographer in question. Her collages not only challenge the patriarchy but also raise issues around authorship and respect. She used the bindings of each volume as the surface upon which to glue various fragments so that the dimension of each collage are determined by the contours of the book from which the sources imagery is taken. In certain cases, the color of the boards and endpapers becomes a crucial aethetic component. In many of Kurland’s collages the book’s spine takes on the corporeal connotations of its name, underscoring the numerous disjointed and damaged bodies that poplulates these works.
For viewers well versed into the history of the photobook part of the fun is trying to identify the artist whose photographs have been reworked by Justine Kurland. Often, the original photographs have been so transformed that it’s a struggle to identify the photographer whose images she has used. At the end of the book is a list of titles of the collages, but they only give the book’s titles and not the names of their creators.
Justine Kurland (1969) is an American photographer based in New York City. She has been making photographs since she was 15. She studied at Yale in the late 1990s under Gregory Crewdson. The collages are a shift in tone and approach from her previous work. While markedly different in tone and approach the defiant female visions pictured in these compositions are a continuation of those depicted in Kurland’s earlier photographic projects Girl Pictures (1997 – 2002) and Mama Babies (2004 – 2007).
Each work in SCUMB Manifesto sounds an electrifying call for freedom: the freedom to create, to destroy, to imagine, and to reshape our visual and social world. Kurland’s book is a forceful and bold statement.
SCUMB Manifesto
Photographer: Justine Kurland
Publisher: Mack
Published in 2022
Swiss bound paperback with silkscreen printed gauze on spine
18 gatefolds with 2 paper stocks
48 x 60 cm poster inserted in the back of the book
24,5 cm x 32 cm, 282 pages, 116 plates
Includes essays by Marina Chao, Renee Gladman, Catherine Lord and Ariana Reines
Shortlisted for the Author Book Award 2022 at the Les Rencontres de la Photographie festival in Arles
Shortlisted for the 2022 Paris Photo – Aperture Photobook of the Year award
Choosen by people immersed in the photobook world as one of their favortie photobooks of 2022