Crowds | 2025

Crowds is a durational photo-performance staged at the International Center for Photography, New York in January 2025. Over the course of a week at ICP, I created a multi-projection installation of overlapping archival images drawn from my personal collection of magazines published in Lima, Peru in 1979, the year of my birth there, and a period of turmoil and unrest. From them, I selected images featuring protests, political marches, demonstrations, sit-ins, and mass gatherings. During the performance I photographed my own body and other women posing with, moving through, and interrupting the imaginary, reprojected space of the crowds. Using extremely long exposure times and a large format film camera, my subjects and I held still for as long as 30 seconds creating a heightened tension between stillness and movement, past and present, self and crowd. Our bodies are seen standing, sitting, resting, holding, raising our arms, and lying down while archival crowds of anonymous bodies and faces paint over and reanimate in us. I am interested in the ways that violent histories echo into the present, the resilience of oppressed people, and the possibility of enacting political change. In Crowds women embody the architecture of resistance, rage, and revolution, but the photographs also contain contradictions: feelings of exhaustion, estrangement, even alienation amidst the weight of history. Description: The portfolio of (9) 40''x50'' Silver Gelatin Prints were photographed during the live performance on 8x10 film, developed and contact printed on-site at ICP, and later enlarged in my LA darkroom. Documentation in color shot by Jeenah Moon/ICP.

TARRAH KRAJNAK

TARRAH KRAJNAK