Starting Without a Beginning: Tarrah Krajnak
Tarrah Krajnak, Body Configurations (Venice Portfolio) 5, 20x24 Silver Gelatin Print, 2024.
Tarrah Krajnak, Mask and Mirror 6, 2017 shown in 2023, 8x10 Silver Gelatin contact print.
Tarrah Krajnak takes on poses that, at one point, might have seemed unimaginable for her specific body to carry. The incisiveness of her work exceeds how critics often define it—as though hers are simply coy reversals and cheeky inhabitations. Instead, her photography-based work engages the amorphous, yet biographically situated sense that she is not of any branching future that the medium’s “masters” ever imagined. But rather than offering solutions or strict counter-imaginings to a history of exclusion, Krajnak has been sitting for more than two decades with aesthetic interrogation of that history’s implications for the practice and study of photography.
In a 2023 interview with Afterimage, she states, “In all of the work I make, I’m trying to figure something out about photography, its limits, the ethics of it, and how it shapes life experience.” Krajnak transfers poses onto her own body from artworks and film that white women performers have taken on by choice or request, in Re/Pose, her most recent photo book. Here, embedded in her exploration of the medium are questions raised by any accepted notion of “the female pose.”
Sparse staging and white clothing emphasize the positioning of her limbs. The happenstance of these emphasizes her disinterest in articulating any intelligible expression. Her staging takes away everything but the pose, and disregards the precision of any pose’s reproduction. The photographed poses might be inviting us to seek out yet-unimagined branching paths that lead somewhere else in time.
Tarrah Krajnak, REPOSE/ Portfolio 16, 8x10 Silver Gelatin Print, 2022–Present.
The performance- and photography-based artist teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also an Indigenous, Peru-born, transracial adoptee of a white, Slovak-American family raised in a white, working-class suburban community of coal miners in Ohio. Art critics consistently convey her work as a reversal, confrontation, or occupation of a “(white) male gaze,” in a tradition of 1970s and ‘80s feminist performance and photography-based artists Krajnak values. But, unlike Krajnak, the scope of their work does not encompass her intellectual, political, material, performative, and conceptual apparatus.¹
Another fascination she pursues in her work are the tentative, nonlinear unfoldings that emerge through sitting with and creating from speculative origins. “The confusion about the source material is one place where I locate the failure of photography, in the same way that searching for personal origins can only end in failure,” she says in Afterimage. “There’s a way in which photography begins to mirror my own experience as a transracial adoptee and my inability to return.” In this space of studying, years do not follow one after the other: They resound irregularly in relation. And in her photographs, Krajnak bends analog processes to overhear.
A canonical Jorge Luis Borges short story opens with a missing beginning. El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan is mostly told through the point of view of Yu Tsun, a spy for Germany during World War I. The unnamed omniscient narrator who introduces Tsun’s testimony relays that its first two pages are missing. The narrator does not further describe, condition, nor gesture toward their omission; they are simply unavailable. The testimony starts, but it has no beginning. The story’s title is the title of Krajnak’s first book project, a collaboration with Shawn Bush. The story’s Borgesian-labyrinthian non-logics reverberate throughout her work to the present, both its unavailable two originary pages and a single line, “I leave to various futures (but not all) my garden of branching paths.”
Tarrah Krajnak, Self Portrait as Building with Child Prostitute, 1979 Lima, Peru/2019 Los Angeles, CA, in 1979: Contact Negatives, 2019, cyanotype print.
Somewhere else in time, Krajnak found a mask depicting the character Semar from Javanese mythology at her family’s cabin on Puget Sound. This project, made in 2017 but not shown until 2023, replays the quickened, inexact performance aesthetic of Re/Pose, and the bibliomancy of working from materials that seem to find her as much as she finds them, like the Peruvian magazines from the year she was born that led her on the forking path projects within 1979: Contact Negatives. She works then—as now—with her body, which she calls “a research tool,” to figure the asymmetry of how her embodiment and conceptual impulses might work her into some yet-unannounced future’s past.
One critic describes 1979: Contact Negatives as “a spectral and speculative return to the place of her birth.” But the future’s past she performs in them would have been unimaginable by the historical path the object itself forged. Krajnak describes the palimpsestic nature of the cyanotypes that gather her performances for 1979 in East of Borneo, “There are many levels of re-photography here because I’ve not only re-photographed the magazine pages, but I’ve rephotographed the re-photographs. And then I’m projecting them and then I’m rephotographing that.”
Tarrah Krajnak, Three Circles in Black Messengers, 2013-present, Silver Gelatin Print.
Tarrah Krajnak, Sand Dunes and Twig in Black Messengers, 2013-present, Silver Gelatin Print.
No matter the technical precision and time-intensive dedication of her medium-format, darkroom-based process of gelatin silver print-making, Krajnak is not led by a sense of exercising mastery over her work. Black Messengers, for example, a collection of small, silver gelatin prints shot on 35mm film, finds and focuses our attention on imprints in archaeological sites, outlines, unidentified torsos, as though these are clues that will not add up. In César A. Vallejo’s poem, “Los Heraldos Negros,” which lends this work its title, what’s certain is that these heralds pool suffering together:
todo lo vivido
se empoza, como charco de culpa
en la mirada.
But suffering also flickers through with other feelings. And even less certain is their source: La mirada is synecdoche for a mark without referent. In her curation of Black Messengers, there is no effort to cohere a single narrative, logic, form, impulse. Clues without a case.
She reinvents her performance and photographic practice with conceptual precision in Re/Pose. “Re/Pose is drawing on every project I’ve done in the last 20 years,” she says to me. “I don’t know whether this project is about rewriting the past or about a speculative archive, about the futures that have passed through me, over me, unimagined, and unimagining me.” The project offers its conceptual precision through her questions becoming more fine-grained, looping together the painstaking material process of making, the sometimes awkwardness of a quick embodiment, a newfound enjoyment of lighting, a wonderment at some questions’ persistence. As though the question can become what tethers one layer of time to the next, and the bended spacetime is also the insufficiency of a labyrinth thought in two dimensions.
The work that brought her to gallery representation and to the attention of the traditional art world was 2020’s Masters Rituals II: Edward Weston, which restages Weston’s nudes by pulling the camera back on Krajnak’s uncomfortable positionings in an echo of his photographic subject’s forms.
Tarrah Krajnak, Self-Portrait as Weston/as Bertha Wardell, 1927/2020, from Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes, 8x10 Silver Gelatin Print, 2020.
In Masters Rituals I: Ansel Adams and II: Weston’s Nudes, just as in Re/Pose, Krajnak lingers in “re”: redoubling, remixing, rechoreographing, replying, restaging, recalling. The first occasion for Re/Pose was an invitation to install an in-process work. For the installation version —at CalArts REDCAT in L.A. in 2022 and the Palazzo Grazzi in Venice in 2024—Krajank set up her studio in the gallery. She invited attendees to choose a pose for her to work into for a photo portrait. Some of the poses were so intricate that her assistant had to place her in them, scootch an arm, direct a leg.
As one critic points out, what’s firstly provisional about the images is the aesthetics of rehearsal—relaxed white T-shirt and jeans, an unironed and unsmoothed backdrop. Bright white wrinkles, folds, bunches, and curved edges, bending back into space just as over her body. These minor dimensions showing up as photographed lineaments stay in rehearsal and replay, before they emerge for us, the lights and darks of the photograph to come. These are layers of what starts each print’s motion, each layer without a strict beginning: white fabrics, white turned exposed print, light’s optical and material journeys, the tension of reperformance and irregularities, the unimagined future forking off from a rechoreographed past.
The published collection, Re/Pose, omits the “source” images. In the omission of immediate historical referents for her poses is another echo of the first two missing pages of the testimony in El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. These absences change the emphasis of the work from the relation between the historical feminine pose and Krajnak’s rearticulation to the absence of an “original” pose. From the instability of the feminine arises a pedagogy of speculating origins. As though the racialized feminine proceeds unhinged from a strict historical tether and turns instead in a speculated temporality, released somewhere else in time, where Krajnak is both teacher and student to the questions.
Tarrah Krajnak, REPOSE/ Portfolio 4, 8x10 Silver Gelatin Print, 2022–Present.
Tarrah Krajnak, REPOSE, Artist printing in On-site Darkroom.
There is a level of unease that accompanies recognition. Some of the apprehension arose from making work—often, in collaboration—for more than a decade beforehand. Recognition and professional representation necessarily involve articulating coherent projects with beginnings and discrete aims—if not ends—even when the aims are also active questions. But if Krajnak lingers in “re,” part of what happens in her photographic collaborations is a reorganization of looking. We aren’t invited to examine or surveil her form. She’s not vulnerable to us, even if she might have been vulnerable in the moment, even if she’s allowed herself to become tender, at rest, eyes closed. Her collaborations are with questions, materials, process, history, uncited sources that fold out to their own unoriginal starts. These hold our attention by setting us in motion. The images unfigure us. They reorient our way of looking. They ask us to not be held back by other habits, to insist on some more sumptuous engagement. They drag us onto branches of forking paths that let us feel our way to somewhere else in time. One pose at a time.
But Krajnak offers a specific sense of pose. if we’re not seeking to “settle” origins, and if we’re sitting with figuring a way to sustain a speculative mode of engagement through Re/Pose and its echo in and out from Krajnak’s other works, then the poses matter in as much as they are felt bendings, rather than because they are explicit coordinates.
And so then where are we?
Any resolve of the racialized feminine in these encounters could be an unplaced memory of texture, jeans bunching up with each careful movement, a T-shirt that winkles when you sit down, and someone off-camera, maybe in the distance, telling you how to use your body. And there you are, with unremembered circuits that left messengers but no source, still figuring the figure of how to make and feel your body in this time in this place from the inside-elsewheres of the moments that resound against this one.
¹ For an example of this emplotment of Krajnak’s work, see Amanda Maddox, “She’s Got the Look,” Aperture (Winter 2023) 51.