In the spirit of the 19th-century landscape photographers, who produced idealized, utopian images of the American wilderness, Justine Kurland crisscrosses the country with her 4 x 5 camera and her young son, meeting and photographing fellow travelers in grand natural settings. These travelers include runaway girls, train-hopping hobos, hippies in communes, and mothers with their children. In her lush, mid-scale prints, stilled in all their raw, complex, and, often, naked or half-naked beauty, her subjects appear to be the very image of self-reliance and freedom so mythologized in American folk songs and literature. Kurland foregrounds the fact that she is not a documentarian, claiming, “[W]hat defines my photographs is this portal to a certain kind of fantasy of America, of what our national identity is, a seminal identity.”