Biomythography
Investigating biomythography as an interdisciplinary visual arts practice.
Tarrah Krajnak
b. 1979 Lima, Peru
Lives and works in Claremont, CA.
Artist Statement
Master Rituals #1: Ansel's The Making of 40 Photographs
This project explores my own positionality in relationship to the legacies of modernist canons or "masters" within the history of photography. I use Ansel Adams' iconic guide book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs as a starting point for a series of performances, experimental poetry, and re-photography. In this book, published at the end of his career, Adams looks back at his photographic archive and recalls the circumstances and technical considerations behind 40 of his most celebrated photographs. In my series, made 35 years later, I insert my body and my own photographic archive over Adams' while redacting his words to reveal hidden poems and new narratives that tell the story of my most memorable photographs– some of which were shot in the same locations. As these gestures are recorded multiple times in various media, The Making of 40 Photographs becomes a performative ritual of un-making, re-writing, and re-claiming this photographic history as my own.
Bio
Tarrah Krajnak is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at the SUR Biennial in Los Angeles, PGH Photo Fair, Filter Photo Festival, Art13 London, Art Basel Miami, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Center for Photography Woodstock, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Philadelphia Photographic Arts Center, San Francisco Camerawork, Columbus Museum of Art, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, and Ampersand Gallery & Fine Books. Her work has appeared in both print and online magazines including the LA Review of Books, Nueva Luz, and Camerawork. She received grants from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Vermont Council for the Arts, The Vermont Community Foundation, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She was recently awarded the Texas Photographic Society's First National Photography Award in 2017 and has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Fotofest Houston in Spring 2018.