Tarrah Krajnak

“Using a temporary darkroom, multiple projections, large format cameras, and re-photography I imaginatively “return” my body to Lima, Peru in 1979, the year I was adopted from an orphanage there. The resulting series of self-portraits emerge from intersections between the city’s fraught history and my own, making visible the ways that violent or traumatic histories can be held in bodies and excluded from archives. I am interested in the multi-temporality of the photographic medium, and the potential of the darkroom itself as a site of performance or spectro-poetics– a way of conjuring the ghosts that haunt a life.“ (Tarrah Krajnak, 2022)

Tarrah Krajnak is an artist working across photography, performance, and poetry. Krajnak was born in Lima, Peru in 1979. Krajnak is the recipient of the Jury Prize of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles, and a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies. Her book El Jardín De Senderos Que Se Bifurcan was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo First Book Award in 2021 and named to MoMA's inaugural list of ten photo books of the year. 

Krajnak has exhibited widely at Honor Fraser Gallery, Houston Center for Photography, SUR Biennial Los Angeles, Filter Photo Chicago, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Center for Photography Woodstock, SF Camerawork, Philadelphia Photographic Arts Center, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Belfast Photography Festival, Unseen Amsterdam, Les Rencontres d'Arles and Landskrona Foto Festival. Her photographs are held in numerous collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Pinault. Her work has been published and reviewed in Aperture, Artforum, New York Review of Books, and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles among others. Krajnak’s work is supported by a Howard Foundation Fellowship and a Lewis Baltz Research Fund Award. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Oregon, and an artist-in-residence with Unseen California. She currently lives/works between Eugene, OR and Los Angeles, CA.