© Tarrah Krajnak, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes published by TBW Books

The much celebrated project and book by Tarrah Krajnak, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes, published by TBW Books in 2022, asks us to ponder many of the conceptual conflicts stirred up by the medium of photography today. The work offers contemporary formal studies beyond those created by Weston in the 1920s and 1930s meant to simply celebrate the beauty of the female form. Across the book’s 21 plates, we are confronted with the question of how we are meant to feel and interpret the legacy of Weston, specifically Weston’s nudes, with what we now understand about issues of representation, authorship, power dynamics, and exclusion.

© Tarrah Krajnak, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes published by TBW Books

© Tarrah Krajnak, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes published by TBW Books

Krajnak critically and gracefully poses her own body in contrast to the poses of Bertha Wardell and Charis Wilson, the models of Weston’s seminal nude photographs, in order to reconsider the modernist works that are a part of the canon of our medium. When Krajnak, both subject and author, photographs herself next to the original nude works of Weston, it is in stark contrast in terms what is revealed and what is concealed, who is looking and who is being looked at, who is included and who is excluded.

© Tarrah Krajnak, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes published by TBW Books

© Tarrah Krajnak, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes published by TBW Books

© Tarrah Krajnak, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes published by TBW Books

© Tarrah Krajnak, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes published by TBW Books

© Tarrah Krajnak, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes published by TBW Books

In addition to the photographer’s own likeness, items such as stones, cinder blocks, and the camera’s cable release that appear in the artist’s studio of Master Rituals II are a part of Krajnak’s idiosyncratic visual language. These objects are a signature of her images. Every symbol included in the images of the book is intentional. Every offering a subversion of the status quo. Stones appear again in the work Rock Paper Sun (2023); cinder blocks and cable releases are part of the Body Configuration (2024) works; and the cable release appears again and again across the artist’s several self portrait series. 

© Tarrah Krajnak, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes published by TBW Books

The most striking takeaway from this book is that after reading it’s pages you can no longer see Edward Weston’s seminal nudes in your mind’s eye without the direct gaze of Tarrah Krajnak seared into your mind too.

© Tarrah Krajnak, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes published by TBW Books

From the publisher: Deconstructing Edward Weston’s Nudes in the form of self-portraits, the artist Tarrah Krajnak inserts herself as both author and subject into Weston’s original work. Replicating the poses of models Bertha Wardell and Charis Wilson, she sits before the camera with a remote shutter release in hand, her body depicted beyond the boundaries of Weston’s original fragmentation, confronting the lens with a light meter, a gas mask, a defiant gaze. Krajnak’s critical homage subverts not only the decidedly male compositional apparatus behind Weston’s figure studies— her control of the frame foregrounds the agency of the posing women—but also the ideal of white female beauty central to Weston’s work and its historical appreciation. Awarded the Jury Prize of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2021, Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes interjects itself as commentary into the photographic canon while existing on its own as an independent work of masterful concept, execution, and expression.

Tarrah Krajnak is an artist working across photography, performance, and poetry. She was born in Lima, Peru in 1979, and currently lives in Eugene, Oregon. Krajnak is represented by Zander Galerie, Cologne. She is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, and was recently awarded the Jury Prize of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies, and the Hariban Grand Prize, Kyoto, Japan. Krajnak has published three books including El Jardín De Senderos Que Se Bifurcan (DAIS 2021), Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes (TBW 2022) and RePose (FW Books 2023). Her work was featured in recent issues of Aperture, British Journal of Photography, The Eyes Journal, and European Photography. This year Krajnak’s work was exhibited in Corps á Corps at Centre Pompidou, Paris, Photography Now at Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Aperture’s traveling exhibition You Belong Here: People, Place, & Purpose in Latinx Photography, and Shadowings at the Huis Marseille Museum of Photography, Amsterdam. Krajnak’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Pinault Collection, Paris, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago among others. Her work is currently supported by a Lewis Baltz Research Fund Award, Le Bal, France, and a Howard Foundation Fellowship, Brown University.

TBW Books is an independent photography book publishing company founded in Oakland in 2006 by Paul Schiek. In 2024, we began a partnership with the Miner Anderson and Baker Street Foundations, who assist in enabling us to further champion the works of underrepresented artists. In 2023, TBW Books began its sister company Workshop de Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Sara J. Winston is an artist and contributor to Lenscratch.

Follow Tarrah Krajnak, TBW Books, and Sara J. Winston on Instagram:
@tarrahkrajnak_studio; @tbwbooks; @sarajwinston