Variety photoplays: several young, newly prominent women photographers have more in common than their rising reputations. Trained in graduate programs in the late `90s, they tend to use adolescent girls as their subjects, prefer staged scenes to candid shots and often inject narrative elements into their pictures. Below, a look at five of these emergent image-makers - Anna Gaskell, Dana Hoey, Justine Kurland, Malerie Marder and Katy Grannan

Art in America, June, 2002 by Phyllis Tuchman

Launch Time

When photographers Dana Hoey, Justine Kurland, Malerie Marder and Katy Grannan exhibited their prints in "Another Girl, Another Planet" at what was then called Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art in New York in spring 1999, none of them had yet had a solo show. Today, just three years later, they all enjoy international reputations. Their images of teenagers and young women have been featured in museum shows, myriad art fairs and all sorts of publications. They have lectured on their work to audiences from New York to New Zealand.

Given the celebrity of this quartet and another colleague, Anna Gaskell, anyone who is not yet familiar with their accomplishments may wonder how much of their success is due to fortunate timing. After all, photography rules right now. As color prints blanket display rooms once monopolized by painting, a sizable portion of a younger generation has turned to the camera rather than to brushes and oils to best express themselves.

But there is no easy explanation for the success Gaskell, Hoey, Kurland, Marder and Grannan other than the quality of their work and their conviction. Their photographs are as different from one another as an Andy Warhol painting is from a Roy Lichtenstein, or a Claes Oldenburg sculpture from a cast by George Segal. Gaskell creates suspenseful scenes, while Grannan is a portraitist. Kurland takes views of active youths in landscape settings. With wide-ranging interests, both Hoey and Marder work in black-and-white and color, often focusing on figures in rooms as well as outdoors.

Yet the five share more than just their thirty-something age. Each of these women attended the graduate photography program at Yale University during the late 1990s. While pursuing their own concerns, they share an esthetic nurtured by their professors in New Haven, and they work for the most part with staged realities. Their prints balance rich color and clear light. When capturing a landscape, they include figures as well. Moreover, in their solo shows, the overall installation can be as distinctive and important as the individual pictures.

The images in "Another Girl, Another Planet" celebrated young girls on the threshold of adulthood. The show's cocurators, gallery partner Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and photographer Gregory Crewdson, a Yale professor whose teaching assistants have included Gaskell, Hoey and Kurland, selected 13 artists based in New York, Los Angeles and London, as well as Germany, India, Sweden and the Netherlands, who use adolescents and their slightly older sisters as models. Crewdson even invoked a snappy tune to celebrate the occasion by appropriating the title of the show from a lively track by The Only Ones, an English punk band popular during the late `70s. A short story by A.M. Homes appears in the smart catalogue.

All but one of the featured artists were women. With curatorial tongue in cheek, prints by Gabriel Brandt, a classmate of Marder and Kurland, were included because he has a unisex first name, and his subjects, including Marder, were appropriate. Six of the exhibitors attended Yale. (1) Work by Gaskell is reproduced in the catalogue, though she was not in the show.

In the whitewashed, luminous gallery, the color prints sparkled. Heralding a new wave of photographers, the show called attention to the manifold ways a camera can deal with young adults. Some of the subjects, for example, were characters in an implied narrative; others served as more neutral formal elements, and still others represented traditional portraits with a twist. An arcadian scene by Kurland in which swimmers frolic and converse in a sundappled cove contrasted markedly with Marder's film-noir-like image of a girl on a float in a swimming pool at night. In Hoey's Monie, a C-print appearing on the back cover of the catalogue, a young woman sitting at a table stuffs coins into penny wrappers, while another girl, lying on a bench, reads want ads. Visitors to "Another Girl, Another Planet" could experience alienation, anxiety, ennui and independence--all up close and personal.

The photographs, a number of which were mounted on aluminum rather than framed under glass, tended to be larger--say, 30 by 40 inches and up to 59 inches square--than prints predating the `70s. Yet they are smaller than the huge views associated with such German practitioners as Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, whose works rival in size paintings by Jackson Pollock.

Greenberg Rohatyn set the tone for the show in the catalogue's introduction. "This gallery," she wrote, "represents the merging of two generations of partners, reflecting a range of interests and aesthetic sensibilities. One of the pleasures of this space is our ability to span these generations ... by providing a venue for ... the established as well as the emerging artist." (2)

When contacted about this article, Gaskell and Hoey, both of whom have experienced critical success on their own terms, asked not to be included. They prefer not to be identified as members of a group. They recognize no movement with which they can be associated. For them, there is no shared subject matter or formal language. To some extent, they are right; there are more apparent differences than similarities among the women featured here. That said, though, omitting Gaskell and Hoey from this piece would constitute its own kind of misrepresentation. Their protests recall those of such artists as Carl Andre and Donald Judd, who, during the mid- and late `60s, repeatedly maintained that they did not belong to a so-called Minimalist movement, even as they participated in the movement's defining exhibitions, such as "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum. Several Pop artists expressed similar concerns about being banded together as well.