Tarrah Krajnak - Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist
School of Art, Art History & Design
Author
03/17/2021
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123
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Description
Tarrah Krajnak was born in Lima, Peru in 1979. She is currently an
Associate Professor of Art and Director of the Monroe Center for Social
Inquiry on Racial Justice at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA . Krajnak is a
2020 Lightwork AIR recipient, and her work "El Jardín De Senderos Que Se
Bifurcan" was awarded the 2020 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize by the Center
for Documentary Studies. A monograph of the project is forthcoming with DAIS
books in early 2021. She has exhibited her work at as-is.la, Honor Fraser
Gallery, Houston Center for Photography, Filter Photo Chicago, SUR Biennial
LA, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Center for Photography Woodstock, SF
Camerawork, Philadelphia Photographic Arts Center, The National Museum of
Women in the Arts, Photo Madrid, Photo London, Belfast Photography Festival,
and Unseen Amsterdam. Her work has been reviewed in Glasstire, Artforum, and
Contemporary Review LA.
Searchable Transcript
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- [00:00:00.760]Dana Fritz (she/her): School of art art history and design at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and I am so delighted that you've all joined us tonight thanks for tuning in.
- [00:00:10.480]Dana Fritz (she/her): To this evening's Hixson-Lied visiting artists lecture in the School of Art, Art History & Design. This lecture series is generously supported by the Hixson-Lied Endowment.
- [00:00:21.720]Dana Fritz (she/her): And i'd like to remind everyone to mute yourselves and to turn your cameras off during the lecture.
- [00:00:27.520]Dana Fritz (she/her): We will have some time for Q amp a at the end, so please post your questions in the chat then and we may call on people to ask them where we may just ask them from the chat so we'll we'll see how that goes.
- [00:00:41.840]Dana Fritz (she/her): And I am delighted to introduce tonight's speaker Tara chronic associate professor of art director of Monroe Center for social inquiry on racial justice at pitzer college in Claremont California.
- [00:00:57.000]Dana Fritz (she/her): she's also the host of a new podcast called purple photographs tune in and I met Tara through the Society for photographic education, conferences and I have followed her work with great interest, ever since.
- [00:01:12.520]Dana Fritz (she/her): And while Tara has a long and distinguished record of achievements her recent awards are especially exciting and noteworthy and i'm happy to share.
- [00:01:22.960]Dana Fritz (she/her): Some of them, she was a 2020 artists in residence at light work a distinguished photography nonprofit that's been hosting residences exhibitions and publishing.
- [00:01:33.920]Dana Fritz (she/her): For nearly 50 years and arguably the most venerable residency in photography Tara was also were awarded the 20 dorothea Lange Paul Taylor price by the Center for documentary studies at Duke university.
- [00:01:48.480]Dana Fritz (she/her): The length Taylor prize supports artists working alone or in teams who are engaged and extended ongoing field work projects that fully exploit the relationship of words and images in powerful persuasive representation of a subject.
- [00:02:03.840]Dana Fritz (she/her): Paris dynamic combination of images and text will also be published in a 2021 monograph by day us books, a small independent press known for exceptionally thoughtful design and materiality in books.
- [00:02:20.480]Dana Fritz (she/her): Terrorists work has also currently shortlisted for the forthcoming Earl.
- [00:02:26.920]Dana Fritz (she/her): Louis read our discovery award, and that means that will be exhibited at or uncomfortable the esteemed annual photography festival in the province region of France, I so wish that Taro could be here with us today, and when.
- [00:02:43.560]Tarrah Krajnak: I do to.
- [00:02:44.920]Dana Fritz (she/her): me eight degrees sunny beautiful it feels like spring, even though it was below zero for the high couple weeks ago the snow is melting, we wish you were here.
- [00:02:56.880]Dana Fritz (she/her): But we're going to make the best of our pandemic conditions with undergraduate Q amp a tomorrow grads studio visits over zoom and right now, it is my great pleasure to introduce Tara crank.
- [00:03:13.920]Tarrah Krajnak: Thank you Dana, let me just get my screen share set up here.
- [00:03:18.840]Dana Fritz (she/her): Okay.
- [00:03:20.600]Tarrah Krajnak: This isn't working no.
- [00:03:22.200]Tarrah Krajnak: I have to share screen.
- [00:03:26.800]Tarrah Krajnak: Okay.
- [00:03:29.600]Tarrah Krajnak: Okay.
- [00:03:34.200]Tarrah Krajnak: let's see.
- [00:03:40.160]Tarrah Krajnak: Are you guys, seeing that.
- [00:03:43.600]Tarrah Krajnak: No.
- [00:03:46.960]Walker Pickering: No.
- [00:03:47.680]Dana Fritz (she/her): We are not seeing your screen share yet.
- [00:03:58.160]Tarrah Krajnak: Okay, can you see that.
- [00:04:00.720]Dana Fritz (she/her): No, not yet.
- [00:04:03.440]Tarrah Krajnak: That is so crazy I just think we just went over the vic.
- [00:04:15.280]Dana Fritz (she/her): i'm gonna make you a Co host.
- [00:04:25.840]Dana Fritz (she/her): Now we can see it.
- [00:04:27.840]Tarrah Krajnak: Okay Okay, so I just needed to be a Co host okay um.
- [00:04:34.720]Tarrah Krajnak: Alright, you can hear me, you can see my screen correct.
- [00:04:38.080]Walker Pickering: Correct yes.
- [00:04:39.280]Tarrah Krajnak: Okay okay i'm going to start now because I hope I get through this all in in time for questions i'm so i'm so happy to be here, it was so.
- [00:04:48.720]Tarrah Krajnak: Thank you Dana for inviting me, and that was such a fabulous introduction Thank you so much.
- [00:04:54.640]Tarrah Krajnak: But also, I had so much fun with the Grad students on Friday I was so great to see all the work that you guys are making and I just really appreciated the virtual virtual studio visits that was really great so thank you for sharing your work with me.
- [00:05:10.440]Tarrah Krajnak: So i'm going to jump right into this my lecture today explores connections between several of my recent projects.
- [00:05:18.280]Tarrah Krajnak: But I thought, in light of the fact that I met with all the graduate students I kind of started to think about my own graduate.
- [00:05:25.360]Tarrah Krajnak: Work and studies and it's been a really long time since i've looked back at that work, and so I thought I would take a short detour back to the beginning of my career and talk briefly about these two early projects that were foundational to the work that i'm doing now.
- [00:05:39.960]Tarrah Krajnak: And on the left is a self portrait as Susan kinect 1938 from this invisible face series that I completed for my graduate thesis project and on the right is post from pose archive.
- [00:05:54.400]Tarrah Krajnak: Which is from a series that I worked on for a good six or seven years I was part of a collaborative team with the photographer wilco Roy and we did a whole series together.
- [00:06:06.960]Tarrah Krajnak: So i'm going to talk about these projects for a little bit and then i'm going to just give you an overview of what i'm going to talk about i'm going to move quickly into my Peru based projects, starting with this work, which is actually from.
- [00:06:19.960]Tarrah Krajnak: it's from a solo exhibition that I did it as this gallery in Los Angeles and it's called 1979 contact negatives.
- [00:06:27.520]Tarrah Krajnak: And all of this work from Peru is part of a larger ongoing body of work that grew out of a series of research trips that I made to my birth city in Lima, beginning in 2011.
- [00:06:38.800]Tarrah Krajnak: And I was adopted, from an orphanage there as an infant in 1979 and so all of this work, really considers the fraud, and I think violent history of the city during that year 1979 and it's especially focused on the lives of women.
- [00:06:58.040]Tarrah Krajnak: And then I finally i'm going to also try to fit in a little bit of a discussion of my master rituals project.
- [00:07:06.040]Tarrah Krajnak: Which is equally I think engaged with performance photography's history and how we inherit or hold history in the body.
- [00:07:16.040]Tarrah Krajnak: And these are the questions that i've been interested in now for about 20 years, as I was looking back at my older work and it's like wow it's been a long time so.
- [00:07:25.000]Tarrah Krajnak: I got my MFA when I was really young I was only 20 when I started graduate school and I was really unsure of everything.
- [00:07:32.520]Tarrah Krajnak: Like I I heard when I listened to the graduate students talk it was really amazing to think about how that experience of making work and having to kind of analyze it and think about it.
- [00:07:45.000]Tarrah Krajnak: Is kind of you know, the similar experience that we all go through, I knew I loved photography I wanted to make photographs, but I had absolutely no idea what that really meant.
- [00:07:54.760]Tarrah Krajnak: A little bit of background I grew up in the Midwest without any real access to the kind of art, that I was introduced to at Ohio wesleyan, which is a liberal arts school that I did my undergrad at.
- [00:08:06.760]Tarrah Krajnak: I graduated in three years and I went straight to New York City, where I had an internship at and my first job at Saturday night live.
- [00:08:16.120]Tarrah Krajnak: I know it's really a crazy year I I basically though left I left New York City after a year because I felt really unfulfilled and I just hated celebrity culture.
- [00:08:28.680]Tarrah Krajnak: And I decided to go to graduate school back in the Midwest at the University of Notre Dame where I had the opportunity to teach which is really what I thought I wanted to do and.
- [00:08:39.520]Tarrah Krajnak: I got to work closely with the artist Martina Lopez, and she was the first woman that I had encountered in my entire art education.
- [00:08:49.640]Tarrah Krajnak: And she was the only woman of color that I had ever had as a mentor even to this day.
- [00:08:55.120]Tarrah Krajnak: And I think I you know when I was so young, I felt like I when I look back, I really needed a mentor like her, someone that looked like me someone that you know really kind of validated my interest in the family album as legitimate site of artistic exploration and so i'm gonna.
- [00:09:16.120]Tarrah Krajnak: At the time, you know the trends of the moment we're very much leaning towards the hugely influential Alex South America documentary aesthetic.
- [00:09:25.960]Tarrah Krajnak: which was very I would describe this cool detached romanticized photographs of working class people in lives and I honestly just hated it.
- [00:09:35.400]Tarrah Krajnak: I wasn't interested in the documentary form at all, and there was something that did not sit right with me about the work right, I thought, these people.
- [00:09:44.160]Tarrah Krajnak: Are my people they look like the people I grew up with my parents are from a really small coal mining town in Pennsylvania.
- [00:09:50.680]Tarrah Krajnak: And both my grandparents worked in the anthracite mines and died and they anthracite mines.
- [00:09:55.800]Tarrah Krajnak: So I found these images almost offensive at 40 by 50 inches on glossy paper or selling to upper class collectors that blue chip galleries, there was just something that didn't sit right with me about the work and I.
- [00:10:09.120]Tarrah Krajnak: You know my graduate work and research, could not have been further from the current trends right, I was interested in.
- [00:10:15.920]Tarrah Krajnak: The history of the family album the 19th century, imagination and that meant that I was looking at things like this spirit photography a cult imagery of ectoplasmic do shane's early medical electrode studies which are on the far left.
- [00:10:33.760]Tarrah Krajnak: And golden's composite studies and I was interested in archival practices, the making of histories racial taxonomy ethnography eugenics.
- [00:10:45.720]Tarrah Krajnak: And that research is ultimately what led to this thesis work, which was consciously modeled after the 19th century, imagination and these kinds of.
- [00:10:56.440]Tarrah Krajnak: What I would describe as intoxicating promises of early modern media technology, you know they wanted to make visible the invisible they wanted to see the unseen.
- [00:11:08.080]Tarrah Krajnak: And these ideas still fascinate me to this day, I was in a sense, with this work, creating my own family album inventing a genealogy weaving myself for my likeness with those of my adoptive ancestors.
- [00:11:22.840]Tarrah Krajnak: And these were made by scanning like really tiny faces from my family album in black and white and then projecting them over my face in the studio and then I was re photographing them onto color large format film.
- [00:11:37.800]Tarrah Krajnak: And after I completed my MFA I got my first job at cornell university and I was managing the dark room and teaching one class and I had the opportunity to meet with the visiting critic that year, who was Matthew higgs.
- [00:11:50.800]Tarrah Krajnak: Who was the curator at white columns in New York City at the time, so it was a big deal, it was my very first studio visit outside of graduate school.
- [00:11:59.320]Tarrah Krajnak: And he took one look at this work that you're seeing right here, and he said one line and he left the room, he told me that quotes as many women who turn the camera on themselves, your work is overburdened with emotion and I will never forget that line.
- [00:12:20.080]Tarrah Krajnak: Because I listened carefully and he rattled off the names of all these artists, that I should be looking at.
- [00:12:26.000]Tarrah Krajnak: And a gaskell justin curlin katie grant and mallory martyr basically every young white woman who graduated from Yale in the last 10 years.
- [00:12:34.160]Tarrah Krajnak: And I had one good friend at cornell and she was in her final year of the MFA program there she so Puerto Rican photographer named wilco roig and she had.
- [00:12:45.960]Tarrah Krajnak: A visit with higgs as well and it turned out, you know afterwards, when all the grads got together, I was there and we were talking about our studio visits and.
- [00:12:55.120]Tarrah Krajnak: It turned out that he said this same exact verbatim line to her about her work, which was really different than mine and he gave her the same list of artists to look at, so you know this goddess really fired up and.
- [00:13:10.280]Tarrah Krajnak: We were driven by our kind of mutual skepticism of the work that we came to refer to as you know, sad girl art by this new generation of young women.
- [00:13:20.800]Tarrah Krajnak: who mostly studied under kreutz in in there in the late 90s, and who were interested in photographing as as we described it as the time is kind of young.
- [00:13:29.080]Tarrah Krajnak: wistful pretty sad very white girls lounging about half naked or wandering aimlessly through nature, and this is yes, very reductive, but this is.
- [00:13:37.560]Tarrah Krajnak: This is kind of what set us off on our on our collaboration, because we agreed that this was not our experience as women of color.
- [00:13:46.920]Tarrah Krajnak: You know this was not what it was like for us growing up this didn't represent our like femininity.
- [00:13:53.200]Tarrah Krajnak: And we were kind of annoyed by this critique and our work at the time, did not fit into this trend, so.
- [00:14:01.240]Tarrah Krajnak: You know the project and i'm going to have to go to because you know one thing about this work is that it's documented but it's like on zip disks and stuff which is just like.
- [00:14:11.000]Tarrah Krajnak: hilarious but i'm so over a period of five seven to seven years we'll get and I worked on this project that was really about.
- [00:14:23.680]Tarrah Krajnak: unraveling the ways in which the female body had been represented throughout photographic history.
- [00:14:29.200]Tarrah Krajnak: And we weren't just interested in the male gaze we but we were interested in women photographing women like how did women see themselves, we wanted to understand these contemporary trends we were seeing.
- [00:14:40.840]Tarrah Krajnak: They were often untitled and we were interested in forming our own kind of revisionist history by tracing these contemporary trends back to their original socio historical roots.
- [00:14:51.560]Tarrah Krajnak: So you know we started with this hysteria collection and you can see the idea here was this kind of replication of the pose but also kind of interpreting it in a contemporary way as well, and the image is always sat side by side and.
- [00:15:07.760]Tarrah Krajnak: You know, one of the other, you know we named the trends so they're supposed to be funny I mean, some of them are like this bed slipping one are a lot of girls slipping off beds during that time naive crawling so we were trying to sort of name the trends.
- [00:15:26.080]Tarrah Krajnak: You know this is, I have not looked at this work in a really long time.
- [00:15:29.800]Tarrah Krajnak: But you know, this is just to say that, like I had you know that this work took seven years of my life.
- [00:15:40.000]Tarrah Krajnak: and fast forward, you know, a decade and i'm making the work i'm making now, but you know I lived many different lives as a photographer so as an artist in.
- [00:15:51.160]Tarrah Krajnak: This work right here, you can also see in my project archive, and these are just three different projects among many that I did in a span of about a decade.
- [00:16:01.240]Tarrah Krajnak: But you know, on the left is a project that brought me to the body, India, where I was tracing the remains of.
- [00:16:07.240]Tarrah Krajnak: an experimental satellite TV program and I was interviewing artists like Lamont young and Robert Whitman.
- [00:16:13.440]Tarrah Krajnak: In collaboration with the writer, and this is an unpublished project that I worked on for about two years and then I was completely broke, and I was living in a cabin on puget sound.
- [00:16:24.760]Tarrah Krajnak: Where I completed this project in the middle called South sound, and it was really about being haunted by the library of a Union therapist and I found this collection of his patients dream journals.
- [00:16:36.040]Tarrah Krajnak: And then you know, on the far right was kind of when I went back to cold hill Pennsylvania, and I kind of indulged in ruin porn for.
- [00:16:45.840]Tarrah Krajnak: Like six months, and you know all of these projects have largely been you know unpublished uninhibited.
- [00:16:53.040]Tarrah Krajnak: And there's more there's more so, you know it was really interesting kind of looking back and thinking about what I wanted to include in this talk So these are kind of things that I.
- [00:17:00.880]Tarrah Krajnak: i'm just throwing in here but i'm not really gonna talk about extensively, but this brings me to 2019 and my last major soul it's exhibition pandemic called 1979 contact negatives, and in this exhibition.
- [00:17:18.280]Tarrah Krajnak: You know I think this, this is really the combination of everything that I was interested in stemming back to graduate school which, which was the archive performance, the body darkroom materiality.
- [00:17:31.160]Tarrah Krajnak: I set up a dark room multiple projectors to large format cameras and I produced all the work on site at the gallery, from start to finish, and.
- [00:17:42.200]Tarrah Krajnak: I thought it was important to reveal the works process, because the history of photography is so important to my practice.
- [00:17:48.480]Tarrah Krajnak: And so, is working with analog materials, I think that analog materials really heightened photography's capacity for chance slowness and a kind of more meditative experience.
- [00:18:01.720]Tarrah Krajnak: And I used low speed film to lengthen exposures eight by 10 cameras to produce a large enough negative for viewing and the gallery, which you can see there on the lower right hand corner.
- [00:18:12.000]Tarrah Krajnak: And this annotate process for making contact Prince and the sanitized process produces this beautiful blueprint which i'm sure you all know.
- [00:18:20.200]Tarrah Krajnak: But I also chose to use the Santa type process because I could use sun and water to develop and I could I also brought in a UV light table so that I could work on cloudy days have shorter developing times, etc, etc.
- [00:18:35.000]Tarrah Krajnak: And this photo was taken on the last day or the closing of the exhibition and you could see all the Santa tapes on the back wall, and I also spent a good deal of time.
- [00:18:43.480]Tarrah Krajnak: sort of enlarging the eight by 10 negatives, so I could print 20 by 24, which is what you see hanging in the upper left these kind of giant negatives.
- [00:18:53.800]Tarrah Krajnak: i'm going to get more into the conceptual elements of this project, but the images that you see projected over my body are all.
- [00:19:00.080]Tarrah Krajnak: rephotographed from a collection of 1979 magazines that I personally collected in Lima, Peru over a span of about three years, so the images that I used are they depict women's bodies on display like this one.
- [00:19:18.200]Tarrah Krajnak: And this one and I started to layer them with multiple protectors, in the space.
- [00:19:24.440]Tarrah Krajnak: Sometimes the women were seeing walking in the street amidst men or the police or military.
- [00:19:31.440]Tarrah Krajnak: I was also interested in scenes that showed political unrest like these large scale protest scenes and in the magazines, many of these images were accompanied by stories of illegal prostitution or we are some other violence against women that occurred on the site.
- [00:19:48.880]Tarrah Krajnak: I chose other images for their historical significance, like this one depicting the controversial miss universe pageant.
- [00:19:58.000]Tarrah Krajnak: And I wanted to show these slides side by side, because this is what the space or performance look like on the left.
- [00:20:04.520]Tarrah Krajnak: And then on the right is the resulting Santa type and the projected scenes envelop my body and here you can see i'm using the white rectangular blocks.
- [00:20:14.400]Tarrah Krajnak: or in some other images I use long rolls of paper to disrupt the flatness of the photograph and to create fragmentation and distortion.
- [00:20:23.640]Tarrah Krajnak: Through these kind of uneven planar surfaces, and I really like the way that it was rendered as a Santa type.
- [00:20:30.160]Tarrah Krajnak: there's something like really magical about the translation, I think, between what was happening in the performance space and then what results as a as a photographic print and then it was all on display so i'm gonna go through some of these kind of quickly.
- [00:20:50.920]Tarrah Krajnak: And just to note that the titles and the dates are really important here.
- [00:20:55.840]Tarrah Krajnak: i'm really invested in the language that is used to describe each of my photographs like titles are important right, so the collapsing of past and present, this one is self portrait as building with child prostitute 1979 Lima, Peru not.
- [00:21:12.160]Tarrah Krajnak: Los Angeles California, and in this way, the titles and the image.
- [00:21:19.280]Tarrah Krajnak: refer to a kind of like imaginative return right i'm kind of my body is imaginatively returned to these past moments.
- [00:21:28.840]Tarrah Krajnak: But that it represents the kind of much larger historic social history that I inherited but did not necessarily experience firsthand so i'm like going back to these moments physically.
- [00:21:55.120]Tarrah Krajnak: Self portrait behind man with clipboard.
- [00:22:00.520]Tarrah Krajnak: And I think this way of thinking through collective historical trauma or post memory it's situated identity as a kind of ongoing process of becoming.
- [00:22:11.080]Tarrah Krajnak: And the lake cultural theorists Stuart hall has been really important to my work and he has written that identities are never a finished product or a given reality.
- [00:22:20.880]Tarrah Krajnak: Rather, he says that identities emerge as unfinished conversations formed at the unstable point where personal lives meet the narrative of history and so that unstable point in time, in my own life was Lima, Peru 1979.
- [00:22:45.640]Tarrah Krajnak: An important aspect of this work was my presence in the gallery over the entire course of the exhibition and I went back and I continue to make work, but I also engaged with the public.
- [00:22:54.880]Tarrah Krajnak: And at the opening there were so many questions about like what I was doing underneath that cloth.
- [00:23:00.320]Tarrah Krajnak: And I was really surprised to find that many did not understand that I was actually using a camera and they didn't understand what a negative was as a physical object.
- [00:23:08.320]Tarrah Krajnak: So in some of the photos i'm actually just kind of explaining like what i'm doing and I didn't really expect that but it's actually really nice to engage with the public that way.
- [00:23:19.840]Tarrah Krajnak: And then, at the end of the exhibition.
- [00:23:25.320]Tarrah Krajnak: At the end of.
- [00:23:27.280]Tarrah Krajnak: At the end of the exhibition, I made a limited edition scene, and it was supposed to record all of the negatives and positives produced and I gave them away to the public, so I made them and I just gave all this news away and.
- [00:23:40.360]Tarrah Krajnak: Over the course of the exhibition I also invited several art historians writers and curators to the gallery.
- [00:23:47.800]Tarrah Krajnak: And all women of color to converse with me about the themes in the work and one of them was an art historian by the name of cave your moon who went on to publish this short essay about my work in the trauma themed issue of this online journal called off ramp and she wrote.
- [00:24:06.320]Tarrah Krajnak: i'm gonna stop this.
- [00:24:09.720]Tarrah Krajnak: let's let it go.
- [00:24:20.280]Tarrah Krajnak: Okay um she wrote cryonics work, I would argue, do not attempt a project of understanding, per se, but one of retrieval.
- [00:24:29.120]Tarrah Krajnak: reenactment empathetic connection and making visible of objects and bodies previously submerged from view and once again represented in the company of cell fashioned kin.
- [00:24:40.200]Tarrah Krajnak: navigating the disruptions and gaps of the historical circumstances do what she was born.
- [00:24:46.240]Tarrah Krajnak: kinect and her Lima, Peru CIRCA 1979 works inventively presents new constellations of being and belonging.
- [00:24:55.000]Tarrah Krajnak: to generate as in boy his tail a movement of time and psychic space that forks perpetually towards innumerable futures.
- [00:25:05.440]Tarrah Krajnak: And you know I really loved the way that she understood my project and we talked a lot about historical trauma and kind of how to how to how to how does one make work about that, and I think she she really helped me to understand my work in different ways as well.
- [00:25:23.080]Tarrah Krajnak: So moon was referring to Jorge Luis for his best known short fictions it's a multi layered time bending story called.
- [00:25:35.120]Tarrah Krajnak: Or the garden of working paths and this the title that I borrowed from my own photo book.
- [00:25:41.560]Tarrah Krajnak: Which is just now being published by Davis books and Dana mentioned that we finally are going to print on march 10 and I want to preface this section, by saying that.
- [00:25:52.360]Tarrah Krajnak: This book took eight years to make you know I handmade three different marks, I spent a good deal of time applying to open calls contest portfolio reviews and I had many offers to publish the book that I didn't feel were the right fit.
- [00:26:07.480]Tarrah Krajnak: The point being that what what you see here is as close to the final version of the book I have documented to date and so i'm going to talk about designing this mock.
- [00:26:17.680]Tarrah Krajnak: But you should know that when I finally decided to work with this was really about Sean as a bookmaker and what he could bring to the project that I could not.
- [00:26:26.840]Tarrah Krajnak: And I was really open to a reimagining of my book, and I think this willingness to collaborate is truly necessary when working with a publisher and it's really made the book better in the end, so i'm going to go ahead and play this.
- [00:26:46.000]Tarrah Krajnak: See okay.
- [00:26:48.280]Tarrah Krajnak: My book begins with an image of my hand, both in the positive and negative form holding two seemingly identical photographs and with the short epigraph by boar Hayes who writes of a web of time.
- [00:27:02.200]Tarrah Krajnak: The strand of which approach one another, I for Kate intersect or ignore each other through the centuries, that embraces every possibility.
- [00:27:11.520]Tarrah Krajnak: We do not exist in most of them in some you exist and not I will and others I do, and you do not in this one, you have come to my gate and another you crossing the garden have found me dead and yet another I say these very same words but i'm an error, a phantom.
- [00:27:30.000]Tarrah Krajnak: And I think in many ways, you know this book was an exercise in spectral poetics or what I would say is a revisiting of the ghosts that haunt a life and the book moves between parallel times it moves between my own voice and those have invented ancestors imaginary mother's.
- [00:27:51.040]Tarrah Krajnak: there's a lot of mistranslated memories and and i'm really interested in this idea of false origins.
- [00:27:59.160]Tarrah Krajnak: And a psychic history, you know how do we know what we know and is there such thing as a psychic history in this book really.
- [00:28:08.040]Tarrah Krajnak: prompts that question.
- [00:28:10.400]Tarrah Krajnak: So the the book is comprised of my own poetry original photographs and appropriated photographs.
- [00:28:16.640]Tarrah Krajnak: From the same archive of the 1979 Peruvian magazines that I use later in the performance exhibition.
- [00:28:24.200]Tarrah Krajnak: So first i'm going to talk a little bit about some of the design aspects of the book and then i'll move into a close reading of my poems hopefully we'll have some time where I can unravel some of the more difficult content they contain.
- [00:28:37.440]Tarrah Krajnak: So I made this book myself in my own studio I use the Xerox machine and glue binding.
- [00:28:45.160]Tarrah Krajnak: And I conceived of the book as a kind of multi tiered experience of text and image, so the design choices, the layouts the fonts to textures the sizes, the scales.
- [00:28:55.600]Tarrah Krajnak: You know it all reflects this the materiality was really important so holding the book in your hands and like how it's floppy and that was really important to me.
- [00:29:06.440]Tarrah Krajnak: And I hope this video gives some sense of like what this is is an object right as it unfolds, over time, in the hands, because that's really I think what's important in a book.
- [00:29:16.880]Tarrah Krajnak: doubles and twins appear again and again and I sequence the book to force the the idea of copies or pairs or sets of images.
- [00:29:26.280]Tarrah Krajnak: So you'll also see that I use a broad range of image qualities in the work, and I do this to kind of reinforce a sense of the images movement through time across space.
- [00:29:36.520]Tarrah Krajnak: And i'm going to go to the and show you up close some of these aspects of the book.
- [00:29:42.760]Tarrah Krajnak: So this is like a one to one reproduction of my hand like reaching into space and touching the photographs and kind of turning them throughout the book so as you move along at the end you finally see all of the photographs facing you.
- [00:29:58.280]Tarrah Krajnak: And then, this was an alternative cover that I made for the book which just has the two photographs of the doubles as.
- [00:30:07.920]Tarrah Krajnak: Actual you know photographs on the cover and then, when you turn it, you can see the photographs there in the hand and a funny story about those photographs, I found those months apart in separate.
- [00:30:23.400]Tarrah Krajnak: bins like I would go to the markets and just look for photographs and I found those.
- [00:30:29.000]Tarrah Krajnak: On separate occasions.
- [00:30:32.240]Tarrah Krajnak: And then, this is examples more of doubles so you know the doubling of using this the spread to force the double but also thinking about doubles in terms of this, the series within the book called time twins i'll talk about that in a second and then you know there's this double bed.
- [00:30:54.960]Tarrah Krajnak: This was taken with a wide pinhole camera, and I only mentioned that because there's so many different qualities like fidelity throughout the book.
- [00:31:03.320]Tarrah Krajnak: So, like that was taken with the pinhole, but this was taking with a really sharp possible blog and again, just like the sense of time and movement through space, I think is important and the image quality really helped to point the viewer in that direction.
- [00:31:19.920]Tarrah Krajnak: And then the images that you see with like the half.com pattern, those were images that are taken directly from the 1979 magazines and i've rephotographed them and Xerox them and then rephotographed them again so they've gone through several layers of reef photography and.
- [00:31:37.760]Tarrah Krajnak: They depict sites where violence against women occurred that year and.
- [00:31:43.160]Tarrah Krajnak: If you were call I found this that image, this one so compelling that I used it again in the performance piece later on and i'll.
- [00:31:52.680]Tarrah Krajnak: you'll see in my work, I start to kind of reuse images and this idea of re photography kind of extends across my series, and this is also one where my body most directly aligns with the image when I projected it into the performance space.
- [00:32:07.800]Tarrah Krajnak: And then back to the book this this image came from a story about like the fast growing sex trade in Lima in the late 70s, as.
- [00:32:17.360]Tarrah Krajnak: Rural migrants flooded the city, driven by economic uncertainty and political unrest like that was the title for that introduced this image as a as an article in the magazine.
- [00:32:30.760]Tarrah Krajnak: And then, in some of the images in my book, I use dried roses placed on top of the Xerox before copying them again so many of the photographs disturb me honestly, at the same time.
- [00:32:43.000]Tarrah Krajnak: I felt the need to call attention to them and to remember them to the act of free photography but my relationship to the archive is also one.
- [00:32:52.560]Tarrah Krajnak: Of resurrection trying to reclaim this history through repetitive acts of copying, and so the roses were a way to make offerings to these like anonymous women and also to cover their bodies.
- [00:33:09.200]Tarrah Krajnak: And one of the central themes of the book is the nature of historical trauma itself.
- [00:33:14.360]Tarrah Krajnak: However, as moon writes this work should not be interpreted as a working through of my own personal experience of trauma per se.
- [00:33:23.800]Tarrah Krajnak: but rather the work should be understood as speaking to a larger social history, of which I am inadvertently apart.
- [00:33:32.480]Tarrah Krajnak: That is itself traumatic, and so the conceptual problem at stake, then, is one of representation, how can one convey the truth of a traumatic social history, as well as the truth of its fundamental incomprehensibility.
- [00:33:50.800]Tarrah Krajnak: And one of the first series of poems that I wrote for the book that I think most prominently addresses this question is titled Marian is October 1977 Stella Maurice Lima, Peru.
- [00:34:05.320]Tarrah Krajnak: And these poems were written as a meditation on photography itself and they deal with three extraordinarily difficult portraits of an orphan named Mary nance.
- [00:34:16.360]Tarrah Krajnak: Who began her life, at the same orphanage as me and I first found these images, while going through the archives kept by the nuns who oversaw my adoption in Lima.
- [00:34:27.640]Tarrah Krajnak: And this series begins with this diptych these poems are at the Center of the book right but.
- [00:34:38.880]Tarrah Krajnak: In when I show them in the gallery.
- [00:34:42.280]Tarrah Krajnak: I don't show the images of Mary knows I only show these images and then you can hear me reciting the poem because i've recorded the poem in a professional sound booth and that was a way that I could be present and absent in the gallery.
- [00:34:59.280]Tarrah Krajnak: i'm going to read the introduction to the poem and then instead of playing you the sound i'll just read the poem but it's it's a bit of a long poem it's like a five minute poem.
- [00:35:08.920]Tarrah Krajnak: But I think it's important that you hear some of my writing because it was really important to.
- [00:35:14.360]Tarrah Krajnak: This book and i'm really proud of the the writing because it took me a long time to get there with my writing right it took me around five years of workshops and thinking about how to write for this project.
- [00:35:26.800]Tarrah Krajnak: So.
- [00:35:28.560]Tarrah Krajnak: In the book the introduction to these depicts 30 years later I returned to the orphanage where I was born.
- [00:35:37.840]Tarrah Krajnak: I found this envelope sitting on a table inside the envelope, I found three palm sized black and white photographs of a young disfigured child.
- [00:35:48.760]Tarrah Krajnak: an orphan named Marinus I photographed the photographs a year later, I rephotographed the photographs every year for seven years, I rephotographed the reef photographs and I have the.
- [00:36:05.040]Tarrah Krajnak: poem sitting over here that I will read to you.
- [00:36:09.160]Tarrah Krajnak: haven't read these in a while so.
- [00:36:11.520]Tarrah Krajnak: Okay, here we go to photograph is to absorb is to archive is to copy is to claim is to death is to desire is to document is to exclude is to erase is to expose is to frame.
- [00:36:32.040]Tarrah Krajnak: is to hold breath is to index is to mediate is to record is to remember is to represent, is to resurrect is to shoot is to steal is to take is to violate.
- [00:36:54.200]Tarrah Krajnak: To photograph is to be absorbed is to archive is to re copy is to reclaim is to be death is to be desire is to be document is to be exclude.
- [00:37:10.800]Tarrah Krajnak: is to read a race is to expose is to reframe is to read hold breath is to be index is to remediate is to re record is to remember is to represent, is to resurrect is to reshoot as to steal his to retake is to re violate.
- [00:37:39.160]Tarrah Krajnak: Marinus.
- [00:37:41.200]Tarrah Krajnak: I violate the violation of you, I retake the taking of your person I re steal the stealing of your agency I reshoot the shooting of your body standing alone abandoned.
- [00:37:56.200]Tarrah Krajnak: IV resurrect the resurrection of your body standing alone I re represent the representation of your body standing I remember the remembrance of your body defected by birth.
- [00:38:10.320]Tarrah Krajnak: I record the record of your body defected I remediate the mediation of your hidden face I re index the index of your hidden.
- [00:38:21.120]Tarrah Krajnak: I really hold the hold of breath for your body cut into I reframe the frame of your body cut I we expose the exposure of your body i've erase the eraser of you.
- [00:38:36.280]Tarrah Krajnak: Are we exclude the exclusion of your face I read document, the document of your wounded burned disfigured.
- [00:38:43.720]Tarrah Krajnak: I read desire, the desire of your body wounded burned disfigured IV death, the death of your dying I reclaim the claiming of your body wounded burned I re copy the copy of your body wounded IV archive the archive of your body I reabsorb the absorption of you Marinus.
- [00:39:07.160]Tarrah Krajnak: So I have not read those in a while, and it is actually really emotional for me to read those.
- [00:39:12.520]Tarrah Krajnak: Which is why I did a recording as well and put them in the gallery as sound I only have a bit of time left.
- [00:39:20.800]Tarrah Krajnak: But i'm trying to get through this so another poem that appears at the end of the book, which is really important is entitled Elegy of milk and this alludes to this kind of intergenerational trauma that the book is really trying to unravel.
- [00:39:36.960]Tarrah Krajnak: Elegy of milk Many say that milk is mild but to me milk is violent and I call it so milk of violence, I will it to be.
- [00:39:49.000]Tarrah Krajnak: A mother could be a blood in utero or via breast milk transmit this dis ease to her baby.
- [00:39:57.480]Tarrah Krajnak: So some of you may recognize the palms first stanza which I borrowed from Roland bart's camera Lou sita and I replace the word sugar with milk.
- [00:40:06.720]Tarrah Krajnak: and arts rights to compare the violence hidden within the photograph to the violence involved with the historical production of sugar.
- [00:40:15.520]Tarrah Krajnak: But my last stanza relates to a really important image drawn from Andy and folklore called let take a Su stata which literally translates to the frightened.
- [00:40:29.160]Tarrah Krajnak: tea and I found this in the research of this anthropologist Kimberly died in his interviews with survivors of sexual violence in the central andy's reveals a widespread belief in the power of mother's milk to transmit prenatal trauma to an infant so according to one account.
- [00:40:51.440]Tarrah Krajnak: One day, some other women told me if you leave your baby in the mountain the mountain God would grab her and she would die.
- [00:40:59.400]Tarrah Krajnak: remembering this I left her on a mountain so she would die, how is she going to live like this, I passed on all my suffering through my blood, through my breast everything passed through my milk my blood my worries.
- [00:41:19.600]Tarrah Krajnak: This indigenous belief clearly articulate this concept of epigenetic memory were trauma could in fact be passed down at the molecular level through generations.
- [00:41:32.840]Tarrah Krajnak: And yet, in part, these indigenous women survival stories have gone entirely missing from the official archives of the war.
- [00:41:39.880]Tarrah Krajnak: Their bodies invisible, as they are continually erase each time the war is recounted and retold.
- [00:41:46.400]Tarrah Krajnak: And so, this research and my writing led me to much larger questions having to do with the iconography of rape and the nature of photographic looking.
- [00:41:56.400]Tarrah Krajnak: And this is a photograph called has anyone ever seen a photograph of rape in this image, you see my hands holding area, as the latest book, the civil contract of photography as they contemplate the provocative chapter title.
- [00:42:09.960]Tarrah Krajnak: When I invited as les to his her to talk about her ideas with my students, she was working on a more recent essay called the natural history of right.
- [00:42:18.400]Tarrah Krajnak: And in this se as a way looks at the quote and taken photographs of rape and using photographs taken in Berlin, just after the end of war war World War Two she reconstructs the history of mass rape.
- [00:42:31.160]Tarrah Krajnak: and in doing so, she challenges the sanctity accorded to the photographic frame as the boundary that determines which photographic narratives can in fact be written.
- [00:42:43.080]Tarrah Krajnak: She says, after all, the aim is not to endorse the known number of raped women with photos of their wounded bodies.
- [00:42:49.240]Tarrah Krajnak: She writes insisting that when we speak about conditions of systemic violence, we should not look for photographs of or about systemic violence but explore photographs taken in such zones of systemic violence.
- [00:43:10.040]Tarrah Krajnak: Okay, so these larger traumatic social histories directly intersect with my own personal narrative.
- [00:43:16.480]Tarrah Krajnak: When I went back to the orphanage to the first time in 2011 I was confronted with the possibility that my own life began with a violent assault.
- [00:43:24.400]Tarrah Krajnak: than 90 year old German nuns who facilitated my adoption told me what they could remember about my birth mother.
- [00:43:31.200]Tarrah Krajnak: They told me that she was very young, she was an indigenous woman who came alone from a village in the north to work for a wealthy family in the city and that she was subsequently raped and had given me up for adoption.
- [00:43:44.920]Tarrah Krajnak: Excuse me, and then.
- [00:43:47.200]Tarrah Krajnak: This is a quote by Maria serkan whose work focuses on the relationship of cultural memory to national identity and she says, we need to ask not whether a memory is true, but rather what it's telling reveals about how the past effects the present.
- [00:44:05.760]Tarrah Krajnak: And so there's something like very unsettling going back to the beginning of things and finding not only absence, but rape.
- [00:44:13.080]Tarrah Krajnak: And researching sexual violence as it relates to peruse political history CIRCA 1979 I understood that I was part of this generation of children.
- [00:44:23.160]Tarrah Krajnak: marked by a past event that we did not experience and so over several years, I tried to locate traces left behind by sexual violence in Lima, I wanted to understand what evidence of this rape story might remain in the city or in the archive.
- [00:44:41.440]Tarrah Krajnak: Early in my research, I came across this Catholic folks ain't name so Rita colonia.
- [00:44:46.840]Tarrah Krajnak: Who is grave attracts a strong cult following, especially among prisoners sex workers and other marginalized groups.
- [00:44:55.480]Tarrah Krajnak: And then I began to see her image all over Lima sarita was a real woman born sometime around 1914 or in a rural village in northern Peru.
- [00:45:05.080]Tarrah Krajnak: When she was 15 she left there to find work as a maid in Lima, where one day she was walking by herself in the streets, a group of soldiers attacked and raped her her story was eerily similar to the ones that the nuns told me about my own birth mother and how strongly it still resonates.
- [00:45:22.880]Tarrah Krajnak: So read the story is in a way, the real story of my birth mother and many other indigenous immigrants who fled their villages seeking safety and opportunity in Lima.
- [00:45:33.360]Tarrah Krajnak: And in a patriarch patriarchal culture where sexual crimes against women went unanswered and unrecorded storytelling served as a powerful outlet.
- [00:45:44.000]Tarrah Krajnak: I gathered the many different versions of this narrative and what I discovered among these variance with something.
- [00:45:51.160]Tarrah Krajnak: Like a catalog of poor urban women's anxieties vulnerabilities of revenge fantasies and dreams of impossible grace and with that material I put together a poem that accompanies this spread of my book called offering to sarita.
- [00:46:12.640]Tarrah Krajnak: And this is the poem which I don't think I have time to read, but I could read it if we have time later.
- [00:46:23.200]Tarrah Krajnak: This spread comes from another section of the book called time twins and here my idea was very simple I put out some ads for models born in Lima in 1979 and then I photograph them both in my studio.
- [00:46:36.680]Tarrah Krajnak: in black and white, and then in St locations around Lima and color and I also made these audio recordings of their personal histories.
- [00:46:44.400]Tarrah Krajnak: The text on the Left reads I returned to Lima and spent several months living in an abandoned home on the edge of a seaside town called bronco.
- [00:46:54.280]Tarrah Krajnak: From here I searched for other women born in 1979 they arrived, one by one, at my doorstep I photographed them and collected Their stories and again the dates refer to this kind of collapsing, the past and presence, the birth date and the year that I photograph them Lima, Peru 1979 2014.
- [00:47:17.600]Tarrah Krajnak: And these were the color versions of the time twins.
- [00:47:21.800]Tarrah Krajnak: And this became another body of work and the black and white version versions are the ones that are meant eventually made it into the book.
- [00:47:29.880]Tarrah Krajnak: But I didn't really know what to do with the recordings my Spanish was really bad and.
- [00:47:37.840]Tarrah Krajnak: I couldn't understand the recordings without slowing them down, and I could only catch a few words.
- [00:47:42.920]Tarrah Krajnak: And around the same time, however, I began that's when I started studying poetry, and these ideas about language and workshops with writers like Carmen humanists Smith.
- [00:47:53.840]Tarrah Krajnak: natalie ideas and then I think Gloria ansel do his work was really important here as well, I started to think of the language barrier.
- [00:48:01.240]Tarrah Krajnak: And my own shame around speaking Spanish as a really important part of the project.
- [00:48:07.000]Tarrah Krajnak: And so, with that in mind, I started writing new poems through a process of like memorization and then mistranslation of the recordings so basically.
- [00:48:15.360]Tarrah Krajnak: I memorized the women's words in Spanish, and then I repeated them back with my bad accent to a translation program and then the translation program would create this kind of strange mix of their story in mind, and so this is one of the resulting poems.
- [00:48:32.560]Tarrah Krajnak: In English it's my father my God my luminous start when I was not yet born when I was born the fatherless times marked me another story hides the way to the teeth, I could not recover the mother years hid from me.
- [00:48:49.080]Tarrah Krajnak: And this poem relates a story about how this woman's mother told her that her father was dead, when in fact he was still alive and a member of the terrorist group called Sendero let me know so or the Shining Path and these fatherless times, as she called them.
- [00:49:03.960]Tarrah Krajnak: Left her angry with both parents, one for concealing the truth, the.
- [00:49:07.720]Tarrah Krajnak: Other for abandoning his family and, yes, these were dangerous difficult years for many.
- [00:49:14.240]Tarrah Krajnak: And my translation of angie story results in a kind of like chunky awkward language that is at the same time evocative of a stuttering violent era that some Romanians referred to as the years have broken glass.
- [00:49:32.320]Tarrah Krajnak: And these are just some of the i'm going to scroll through this pretty quick because I want to get to the time twins hopefully.
- [00:49:40.840]Tarrah Krajnak: You know, this is what the work looks like in the gallery and their sound, you can see some speakers, because I again I recorded the poems and put them into the gallery space.
- [00:49:52.960]Tarrah Krajnak: And you know, eventually, I reshot the time twins portraits the time when portraits as self portraits using the same projection technique, I used in the contact negatives.
- [00:50:01.680]Tarrah Krajnak: Performance space, and these are the images that make it into the new book with Sean so we worked in some of these three photographs.
- [00:50:11.800]Tarrah Krajnak: And these are my contacts she's I don't know I just like showing contact sheets to some of my contact sheets, so I think look I like the multiplicity of them Okay, and so i'm going to try to talk about master rituals really quick.
- [00:50:26.320]Tarrah Krajnak: But this life began also began its life as a book project with writing, but it also uses video performance and re photography and i'm not sure that I have time to play the videos but i'll just have this going why.
- [00:50:40.960]Tarrah Krajnak: Basically, like, I actually have to play this because.
- [00:50:44.440]Tarrah Krajnak: i'm using my body and my hands and my hair different coffee so like a race animals photograph.
- [00:50:53.680]Are beautiful as a weight.
- [00:50:57.200]Of folding star.
- [00:50:59.480]Then legs sinking in sand.
- [00:51:03.600]Long gentle ripples tilting back months.
- [00:51:09.760]With clear control wins focus to do.
- [00:51:14.800]Still.
- [00:51:16.880]I found here the land carried my feet with it.
- [00:51:21.720]Tarrah Krajnak: I mean, so, as you can see what i'm doing is i'm staying true to the form of the book i'm working across the page and i'm finding these hidden poems within animals really technical language.
- [00:51:33.040]Tarrah Krajnak: And sort of reclaiming those that technical language as my own poetic language and then are racing his photograph with my hair.
- [00:51:42.480]Tarrah Krajnak: And this is what the work looks like installed and i've shown it in many different ways.
- [00:51:53.040]Tarrah Krajnak: I go through this.
- [00:51:55.640]Tarrah Krajnak: And i'm but the answer work like i'm really interested in.
- [00:51:59.960]Tarrah Krajnak: How we often still think of ancillary items iconic mid century landscapes, of the American West as synonymous with the set asides and de politicized landscape photography when, in fact.
- [00:52:10.920]Tarrah Krajnak: You know it's it's part of a much larger historical narrative of cold war era us, you know westward expansion ISM genocide and a ratio of indigenous peoples.
- [00:52:22.720]Tarrah Krajnak: And the second chapter which i'll just go through really quickly is this work in progress and i've been printing this is what's on my studio table over there.
- [00:52:31.880]Tarrah Krajnak: The second chapter focuses on Edward westerns nudes and you know the entire project, the master rituals really comes out of my work as both an artist and educator.
- [00:52:41.320]Tarrah Krajnak: Teaching photographic history, making analog photographs and interested in the materiality of the modern right the modern silver gelatin print, but also the problem of how we, as women of color inherit this history that is so white and full of fathers.
- [00:52:59.680]Tarrah Krajnak: And, in other words like the camera as a technology right.
- [00:53:03.760]Tarrah Krajnak: is not an innocent or neutral bystander rather photography continues to play a crucial role in the maintenance of a social hedge of money of whiteness.
- [00:53:12.560]Tarrah Krajnak: And so i've been collecting darkroom manuals that feature, the work of master photographers and I often find Adams and westerns work in these manuals.
- [00:53:21.960]Tarrah Krajnak: And, and this infamous charisse Wilson pose so the title of this diptych refers to again too many layers or echoes of the modern as I like to call them echoes.
- [00:53:32.000]Tarrah Krajnak: Self portrait as cover of darkness to is charisse Wilson as Western 1978 1936 2020 and my body, as you can see, as barely able to conform to the pose my skin is rendered against middle Gray kind of not enough exposure and i'm trying to use the opposite scale here.
- [00:53:49.360]Tarrah Krajnak: And, here are some of the other images from that project so far and again, this is a work in progress.
- [00:53:57.120]Tarrah Krajnak: And again, I think that the work is you know it's part of image park critique.
- [00:54:01.920]Tarrah Krajnak: With these fathers questioning the myths of modernity exploring again how they ECHO into the present and i'm interested in what I myself have internalized about beauty and whiteness not just individually, but also kind of on a collective level.
- [00:54:20.240]Tarrah Krajnak: i'm asking how and in what ways is the language of modernity built into the tools themselves.
- [00:54:32.640]Tarrah Krajnak: And then i'm using blocks of wood and concrete suggests the crop but i'm also allowing the viewer to see beyond the crop to see what lies outside the frame.
- [00:54:40.840]Tarrah Krajnak: And many of westerns original photographs that women are severely cropped they're anonymous Muses, but they were also his lovers, in many cases collaborators dancers, and writers and artists who were lesser known simply because they were women and then in this in this particular photograph.
- [00:54:59.480]Tarrah Krajnak: You know, Western is using his props not only to erase identity, but in this case his use of the firm equates the white woman's body with a centralist ideas regarding the nature of beauty as white as youthful fertile fragile vulnerable.
- [00:55:15.280]Tarrah Krajnak: You know my interpretation is more confrontational less language.
- [00:55:19.760]Tarrah Krajnak: there's the jagged knives of the palm my toes my toes or crawled over the rock i'm wearing a gas mask from a completely different era it's my father's from Vietnam.
- [00:55:29.080]Tarrah Krajnak: And I hold the shutter release and I really want my gaze to be confident in these images and i'm going to end.
- [00:55:37.520]Tarrah Krajnak: Where Helen see so began her 1976 essay the left of the Medusa this quote has been important to me for a while, but I shall speak about women's writing.
- [00:55:47.680]Tarrah Krajnak: about what it will do woman must write herself must write about women and bring women to writing from which they have been driven away as violently as from their own bodies.
- [00:55:58.360]Tarrah Krajnak: For the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal woman must put herself into the text as into the world and into history by her own movement, thank you.
- [00:56:15.800]Dana Fritz (she/her): Thank you.
- [00:56:17.320]wow.
- [00:56:19.480]Dana Fritz (she/her): I want to invite everyone who has a question to put it in the chat and then I can ask some questions and even invite some folks if you would like to.
- [00:56:34.960]Dana Fritz (she/her): Ask yourself.
- [00:56:37.040]Dana Fritz (she/her): So i'm will.
- [00:56:40.440]Dana Fritz (she/her): be happy to.
- [00:56:43.400]Dana Fritz (she/her): get some questions here, people may be typing I asked them to wait and.
- [00:56:49.360]Tarrah Krajnak: I was like no Russians.
- [00:56:52.360]Dana Fritz (she/her): I don't know if that's actually.
- [00:56:56.000]Dana Fritz (she/her): I had never seen the xen that you made for your show in 2019 and.
- [00:57:03.720]Dana Fritz (she/her): That amazed me that the positive and negative on the facing pages is so visually exciting and I wondered if you had any thoughts about publishing that I realized that you gave it away.
- [00:57:18.320]Dana Fritz (she/her): That was limited edition, but.
- [00:57:21.440]Tarrah Krajnak: yeah well I have, I think there's like 15 left maybe um and the getty collected line, and you know I I I think it's just it is what it is, I think it's done.
- [00:57:33.720]Tarrah Krajnak: I I thought about maybe reproducing it, but I think the senderos project was just more of a priority for me to publish because I have my writing and everything in it.
- [00:57:45.480]Tarrah Krajnak: And I actually quite like the DIY aspect of benzene like I just made it at school and stapled together and there's something really nice about that, like I don't know it's on like eight by eight and half by 11 copy paper you know so yeah.
- [00:58:01.240]Tarrah Krajnak: But I do I love the design of it.
- [00:58:03.800]Dana Fritz (she/her): yeah amazing sort of like.
- [00:58:06.960]Dana Fritz (she/her): flow, you know, opening the spreads and sort of seeing that mirroring and the and the inversion and I to me that was super.
- [00:58:14.920]Tarrah Krajnak: yeah yeah it's a kind of like um I think it it allowed me to see the project in a different way and I almost think like it works, just as well as as lean as it does as a performance, you know.
- [00:58:26.720]Dana Fritz (she/her): uh huh yeah that was great.
- [00:58:29.120]Dana Fritz (she/her): yeah so um Is there anyone I not seeing any questions in oh here's a question, thank you.
- [00:58:36.560]Dana Fritz (she/her): Jamie would you like to turn on your MIC and ask.
- [00:58:43.000]Jamie Ho: hi Tara.
- [00:58:44.120]Jamie Ho: hi I was wondering what inspired you to start incorporating poetry into your work.
- [00:58:52.440]Tarrah Krajnak: Sure, it was because you know when you do a when you make a book right there's always introductory text or.
- [00:59:01.120]Tarrah Krajnak: And I hired a writer to write for my book, and I just felt it was wrong, I felt like I needed it needed to be in the first person and not the third person.
- [00:59:11.280]Tarrah Krajnak: And, but I I just didn't think of myself as being able to write an essay and I was like well, maybe I can write a poem to introduce this work, but.
- [00:59:22.040]Tarrah Krajnak: You know, it took me a while to just be able to that you know the senderos work it's so complex that has a lot of layers and I just felt like it needed text and I wanted to be the one to write that text and so that's why.
- [00:59:34.680]Tarrah Krajnak: I started studying poetry and language and sort of thinking about how I could have the chops to kind of do it myself right, and so I just started taking my writing a little more seriously and.
- [00:59:46.520]Tarrah Krajnak: Getting it critiqued and workshopped and and I think like that was the right decision, ultimately, in the end, because I think that book really needs my voice yeah.
- [00:59:58.480]Dana Fritz (she/her): um thanks, we have another question from brennan would you like to ask it Brendan.
- [01:00:05.120]brennanbooker: yeah um I was wondering if, like when you first started writing if, like imposter syndrome with something that you've dealt with, I feel like.
- [01:00:12.480]brennanbooker: A lot of photographers like we like want to write, but we always feel like well we're photographers like not writers and i'm wondering if you.
- [01:00:19.360]brennanbooker: If that was something you experienced and like If so, like did you work through that like what advice would you maybe give to someone who wants to work through that.
- [01:00:26.720]Tarrah Krajnak: I think, like, I think we talked about this a little bit in your studio visit, but I think taking the work into you know, showing it to other people.
- [01:00:37.840]Tarrah Krajnak: and doing doing the hard work of revision right is it that's that's scary it's scary to share your work with legitimate poets and writers, but I did, and I use my Community at, and we have a really fantastic.
- [01:00:53.840]Tarrah Krajnak: poetry and writing program at the five seas and I, a lot of my friends are poets.
- [01:00:59.320]Tarrah Krajnak: And it was like kind of just showing them my work and being getting it critique getting it workshopped and bringing it into that space that really allowed me to think about a writing practice and taking it really seriously like I take my photography.
- [01:01:15.440]Tarrah Krajnak: But I think yeah I think I was not confident at all in my writing until I started to take take it more seriously and like show it to other people and get it critiqued and.
- [01:01:26.080]Tarrah Krajnak: You know, of course, critique workshop it's always a vulnerable space, but I think it's necessary to really get to the get the writing to the level of the photographs, you know really took those.
- [01:01:38.440]Tarrah Krajnak: Getting revising my poems and going into workshops, I spent every summer at the jack kerouac school.
- [01:01:47.280]Tarrah Krajnak: In Europa, you know workshopping and just I would just go by myself stay by myself and just write the whole time yeah.
- [01:01:57.640]Dana Fritz (she/her): Thanks.
- [01:01:59.200]Dana Fritz (she/her): Tara for that answer that's a I actually have a similar situation.
- [01:02:06.400]Dana Fritz (she/her): I can feel it um does anyone else have a question, they would like to ask either live or on the chat.
- [01:02:23.040]Dana Fritz (she/her): we're running a little past our time, so we might just see if there's a couple more one or two more questions and then.
- [01:02:31.360]Dana Fritz (she/her): The lucky few of us have Q amp a tomorrow.
- [01:02:34.800]Dana Fritz (she/her): So that's great.
- [01:02:38.000]Dana Fritz (she/her): um.
- [01:02:39.560]Dana Fritz (she/her): Does anybody else want to ask today.
- [01:02:45.760]Dana Fritz (she/her): Well, you know what Tara I think if you wanted to read the poem that you didn't read.
- [01:02:51.920]Tarrah Krajnak: Oh.
- [01:02:54.120]Dana Fritz (she/her): yeah do you want to.
- [01:02:55.720]sure.
- [01:02:57.680]Dana Fritz (she/her): And then we might see if there's one more question after that, and then we may say that's the end.
- [01:03:03.320]Tarrah Krajnak: Okay, so this one is so Rita colonia.
- [01:03:07.600]Tarrah Krajnak: She is born, she is poor, she almost around she saved by God, she migrates to lead ma her mother died suddenly and her mother dies slowly she becomes the mother she feeds her father's family she feeds the poor she cleans houses.
- [01:03:22.000]Tarrah Krajnak: And she cares for children and she sells fish and she washes clothes and she waits tables she has a prostitute.
- [01:03:28.920]Tarrah Krajnak: And she's a Virgin.
- [01:03:30.080]Tarrah Krajnak: And she is a transvestite and she is a thief and she is a prisoner G as a healer.
- [01:03:35.040]Tarrah Krajnak: She is raped by three fishermen and she has almost raped by three soldiers and she has raised by two police officers.
- [01:03:41.640]Tarrah Krajnak: her vagina is an elbow and her vagina is broken and her vagina is missing, and her vagina is disappearing and her vagina is sealed and her vagina is miraculous and her vagina is absolute.
- [01:03:54.160]Tarrah Krajnak: She is defiled and she has everlasting and she is incorruptible she walks into the ocean and she throws her body into the ocean and she jumps off a bridge.
- [01:04:03.760]Tarrah Krajnak: Her perfect body washes up three days later, and her violated body is found in the street, she sees her dead mother and she sees Scott and she sees an apparition of the Virgin.
- [01:04:13.600]Tarrah Krajnak: She dies of malaria and she overdoses on castor oil and she has shot twice in the head and her death is ordered by the dictatorship and she is knife to death, and she has shot in the back, and she is murdered.
- [01:04:25.240]Tarrah Krajnak: Her mother's ghost leads her to heaven and she rises to heaven and she rises to heaven she dies, and she is born.
- [01:04:34.560]Dana Fritz (she/her): You, I think I.
- [01:04:36.720]Dana Fritz (she/her): heard you read that at a different lecture and that was really.
- [01:04:41.200]Dana Fritz (she/her): No i'm glad to hear it again thanks.
- [01:04:43.480]Dana Fritz (she/her): Thank you.
- [01:04:44.080]Dana Fritz (she/her): i'm going to ask for one one more time if there are other questions.
- [01:04:50.440]Dana Fritz (she/her): And if the end if nothing pops up on the chat and no nobody speaks their question.
- [01:04:58.080]Dana Fritz (she/her): We will end a little bit long.
- [01:05:02.360]Dana Fritz (she/her): I think Tara you may have less does speechless with that incredible poem.
- [01:05:09.280]Dana Fritz (she/her): I wanted so much for your lecture and for your work and for the other work you do in teaching and.
- [01:05:19.640]Dana Fritz (she/her): And all the things that are associated with this your presence in the world and and how you conduct your teaching and your work and your activism and.
- [01:05:31.960]Dana Fritz (she/her): Everything it's a it's a really great to follow and to.
- [01:05:37.520]Dana Fritz (she/her): end to teach actually to so i'm really looking forward to tomorrow with my class and.
- [01:05:43.120]Dana Fritz (she/her): You folks are still around it's two o'clock.
- [01:05:47.520]Dana Fritz (she/her): When my my class will be joining again two o'clock central different Tara.
- [01:05:54.040]Dana Fritz (she/her): And I think we'll end there and we're getting some thank yous and bunch of Thank you okay well Thank you everyone for joining and that's it for tonight for the Hickson lead lecture with Tara chronic and.
- [01:06:10.920]Dana Fritz (she/her): It has been our pleasure to host you.
- [01:06:13.880]Tarrah Krajnak: Thank you so much Dana Thank you so much, and Thank you everyone for coming.
- [01:06:18.280]Tarrah Krajnak: Thank you so much Dana Thank you so much, and Thank you everyone for coming.
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