Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography, Film, Installation, Books & Prints
Website: tamaraporras.com
Tamara Suarez Porras (they/she) is an artist, writer, and educator originally from south Brooklyn, New York. They earned a BFA in Photography + Imaging and Journalism from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a dual MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2018. Following graduate school in the Bay Area, they established their practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they continue to live and work.
Suarez Porras serves as a Lecturer in the Art Practice department at Stanford University and has taught photography and art history at institutions throughout the Bay Area including City College of San Francisco, California College of the Arts, and the International Center of Photography. They previously held positions as Manager of Teacher Engagement at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and Director of Brand Photography at Teach for America. They are a member of the Black Hole Collective Film Lab and serve on the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure in San Francisco.
Their writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, 48Hills, Art Practical, and contemptorary, and they have published essays with Saint Lucy Books, SFMOMA’s Open Space, and CCA Wattis Institute / Sternberg Press. Artist books have been published with Sming Sming Books, Deep Time Press, and National Monument Press.
Suarez Porras works across photography, filmmaking, installation, writing, and performance within a photo-conceptual, research-centric practice. Their work examines the dynamics of seeing, remembering, and forgetting — investigating how photography attempts to grasp the unknowable. Often beginning with vernacular and family archives, the practice probes the ways memory and self-knowledge become unraveled through the layered surfaces of the photographic image.
Their process privileges in-camera effects created without digital manipulation: shooting on medium format film, they employ prisms, layered glass, and physical lens interventions to produce kaleidoscopic doublings and refractions. The series parallax errors uses the optical phenomenon of viewfinder-versus-lens displacement as a metaphor for identity and perception — what happens when competing images cannot be resolved into a single coherent picture. Across bodies of work, recurring concerns include photography’s relationship to cosmic time and the vastness of the universe, the entanglement of personal and collective memory, and the paradox of possessing intimate knowledge of things one has never physically encountered.
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