Farrah Karapetian makes photography physical. Her large-scale, vibrant, camera-less photographs are produced using constructed negatives, or handmade props, the artist fabricates in transparent materials to infuse unexpected texture and volume into otherwise flat, opaque shadows. Karapetian's work usually intersects with public and political spheres. The concerns of previous series span war veterans, Egyptian protestors and stagecraft. The through line for Karapetian is the need to filter public imagery by deconstructing the act of looking and rebuilding it as personal, somatic and expressive photographic practice.
Karapetian was born in Marin, CA, in 1978. She received a BA from Yale and an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Synthesize, MOCA Jacksonville (2017); Light Play: Experiments in Photography, 1970 to the Present, LACMA (2017); and A Matter of Memory, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (2016). Her work is included in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Collection, and illustrated in Charlotte Cotton’s Photography is Magic, published by Aperture (2015). The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.