Justine Kurland: Road Bunnies, 2012

Justine Kurland's Road Bunnies, 2012, is a photograph of her son Casper taken at a campground in Wyoming. The title refers to “road dogs,” street-kid slang for the friends one travels with. Though she is nominally based in New York, Kurland’s work has made her a traveler, over the past decade and Casper has been by her side on countless American interstates and back roads. She has been in search of places and moments that embody the idealism rooted in popular conceptions of the American West, whether as an unspoiled arcadia or as a site for individual renewal. Many of these photographs were part of her series This Train Is Bound for Glory, which merged landscapes with photographs of freight trains, portraits of drifters, and images of Casper. Road Bunnies is from a series of photographs that is more documentary and naturalistic than Romantic in nature.