What would a photographed utopia look like? While the origins of photography coincided with the birth of various nineteenth-century utopian schemes, human society has never seemed further from realizing them, in part due to developments in technology—including the production and distribution of images—that seek to solidify social surveillance and control. Recent glimpses of utopia in still and moving images range from Joel Sternfeld’s collection of photographs Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (2006) to Wu Tsang’s 75-minute film Wildness (2012) documenting an LGBTQ+ bar in Los Angeles. Yet in these examples, and so many more, the viewer feels that a repressive society hovers outside the frame and that these idealized situations are ephemeral. Many of the planned communities in Sweet Earth struggle to survive or have been abandoned; Wildness features a weekly party that Tsang co-hosted for two years before various challenges addressed in the film forced its closing. Similarly, the world captured by Justine Kurland’s “Girl Pictures” series (1997–2002), gathered together in a new publication from Aperture Books, feels transitory in the freedoms that its usually small groups of young women experience across the United States. Although a few of the earliest images were taken in New York …