If SCUMB Manifesto is a gleefully provocative assault on photography’s patriarchal history, it is also an act of wonderfully intricate creativity: the collages possess a vivid, often viscerally powerful life of their own. A selection, created from Lee Friedlander’s series Nudes are currently on display at the Herald Gallery in London as part of a group show, Say Less. She ended up selling the early collages for $900 (£690) each, mostly to her students, though the Museum of Modern Art in New York also snapped up several. “It’s about a system and structures of power, not individuals, though I have to say, some of these guys have been taking up too much room for too long.” This is hardly surprising given that her collages not only challenge the patriarchy but also raise issues around authorship and respect. Of those who did, she tells me, Tod Papageorge said he was flattered, Stephen Shore offered to do a trade for a print and Jim Goldberg sent her a copy of his book Raised By Wolves, to use as raw material, but, she says, “some others had less of a sense of humour and were offended by the work”. “I sent out emails saying, ‘I’ve been making collages out of photobooks and here’s yours’,” she says, laughing over the phone from her studio in New York. Before exhibiting 65 of the SCUMB collages in a Brooklyn gallery last year, Kurland offered each of them to the individual photographers whose work she had cut up and reassembled. They include Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces, William Eggleston’s Los Alamos, Larry Clark’s Tulsa, Martin Parr’s Think of England, Alec Soth’s Sleeping By the Mississippi, Brassaï’s Paris By Night and, most famous of all, Robert Frank’s The Americans.Įach collage is named after the book that provided the raw material for it, but does not refer to the photographer in question. All of the books were from Kurland’s own shelves.

SCUMB stands for Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books, which is exactly what Kurland has done, dismembering and reconfiguring images from around 150 photobooks by white, male photographers.

Andy warhol scum manifesto