October 12, 2026, issue

I want to respond to a couple of photography pieces in this week’s issue.

Vince Aletti, in his “Goings On: Justine Kurland,” reviews an exhibition of Kurland’s photos at Osmos gallery in Manhattan’s East Village. He likes the show. He calls Kurland “one of the most arresting, provocative, and unpredictable photographers around.” I confess I’m not a fan. A lot of her work seems posed. This doesn’t bother Aletti. He writes,

The show opens with two pictures from the color series that introduced Kurland to the world and became known as the “Girl Pictures”—cinematic shots of adolescent girls playing at being runaways. Under the photographer’s rapt gaze, theatricality melts away and we’re caught up in the sweet, casually intimate camaraderie of girls on an adventure. 

“Playing at being runaways” - right there is the problem. The girls are acting. The scenes are staged. And no, the theatricality doesn’t “melt away.” It’s right there in the deadness of the images. Peter Schjeldahl, commenting on Thomas Struth’s staged “Pergamon Museum” photos, said, “There is a subtle but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.” This applies to Kurland’s photos, too. 

Justine Kurland, Blood Sisters (2000)

Contrast Kurland’s images with the work of Joseph Szabo. He’s the subject of Margaret Talbot’s “Photo Booth: The Era of Teen-Age Freedom,” also in this week’s issue. Talbot says,

The photographer Joseph Szabo’s pictures in the new book “American Teen” look timeless in certain ways—the crisp black-and-white of the images, the stately framing, the instantly recognizable, casual but charged, proximity of teen-agers hanging out, arms slung over their friends’ shoulders, heads tipped together, close enough to smell one another’s shampoo. Here they are, crammed together in the random corners they stake out on a big high-school campus, or thigh to thigh on a patchwork of beach towels, or whispering in one another’s ears, thick as thieves, magnetized by one another as by nobody and nothing else.

Joseph Szabo, American Teen

She goes on,

But there is also a sense in which these images belong, ineluctably, to the time in which most of them were made, the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, after Szabo had begun teaching photography and photographing students at Malverne High School, on Long Island. It’s not just the styles his subjects favor—abundant, feathered hair, high-waisted, slouchy jeans, ringer T-shirts, platform shoes, puka-shell necklaces. (In any case, some of their looks would read as hip today.) It’s not even the fact that the photos frequently show kids smoking cigarettes (though that’s certainly striking to see). The adolescent subjects of Szabo’s photos project something else: nearly all, even the ones who look shy or awkward or sidelined by their peers, have a kind of spontaneous presence, the loose-limbed, insouciant grace, even swagger, of subjects who have not been making and curating images of themselves and one another for as long as they can remember. 

Szabos subjects don’t look posed. They seem natural; they're just being themselves.