Tarrah Krajnak Origin Stories

Tarrah Krajnak’s work explores her personal relationship to the history of her home-country Peru, her adoptive American family, and her relationship to a largely white, Western history of photography. In 2011, Krajnak returned to her birthplace after 32 years. Not quite an “insider” or “outsider” in either the U.S. or Peru, Krajnak’s work seeks to recreate and remake histories in an effort to find her own place within many disparate and overlapping worlds.

This solo exhibition includes work from her series Master Rituals: Ansel’s The Making of 40 Photographs, which serves as a catalyst for critical reflection on modernist canons within the history of photography and their lasting legacies on contemporary art. Through performance and documentation, Krajnak inserts her own body and personal history as both an immigrant and a citizen of the United States into an American history of landscape photography, which she understands has had lasting implications on the construction of American identity.

Also included is work from Krajnak’s new book, El Jardin de Senderos Que Se Bifurcan, a photographic effort to trace her Peruvian roots according to contradictory family narratives. Uninterested in recovering authentic familial records, Krajnak presents an imagined history of invented lineages, mothers, and ancestors in an effort to understand her place within the larger political, social, and historical narratives of Lima, Peru.