Scumb manifesto by Justine Kurland

Shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards 2022

Inspired by Valerie Solanas, the photographer's latest project slices away the influence of male artistic 'geniuses' to make room for women in the canon.

Includes essays by Marina Chao, Renee Gladman, Catherine Lord, and Ariana Reines.

On the streets of Greenwich Village in 1967, Valerie Solanas began selling copies of her self-published SCUM Manifesto, charging women $1 and men $2. Solanas, a fringe radical feminist and revolutionary writer, gained notoriety in 1968 when she shot Andy Warhol at the Factory a year later.

The manifesto, which called for the total eradication of the male sex and summoned “civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females” to join her coalition, The Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM).

Justine Kurland’s new project, SCUMB Manifesto, employs Solanas’s idea as the basis for further development.

With Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books, Kurland evokes Solanas’s dream matriarchal utopia by physically clearing out her personal library of photography books by male artists.

“The point of these collages is to annihilate the influence of these men who were introduced to me through my schooling and reinforced by museums, galleries, and publications,” Kurland says of her recent work.

Cutting up and collaging images taken by canonized figures of photography is a symbolic act of dismembering the patriarchy by making room for women photographers who have been denied such veneration.