Tara Wray
Tara Wray
Year of the beast
80 pages
8 x 8 in.
Perfect bound
Too Tired Press
About the Book:
“Year of the Beast” is a stream of consciousness photobook spanning 2020. A chronological diary featuring dogs, twins, and domestic scenes from rural Vermont, under a looming specter of doom.
Tara Wray is a photographer, filmmaker, and founder of the Too Tired Project, a nonprofit arts organization advancing mental health advocacy through photography. Her personal projects are autobiographical in nature and focus on issues of mental health and the ambivalence of family ties. And dogs. She makes art to understand the world around her and to define her place within it. Her recent photobooks include “Too Tired for Sunshine” (Yoffy Press, 2018), and “El Dorado Freddy's” (collaboration with Danny Caine, Belt Publishing, 2020).
Book review by Liz Larsen |
Year of the Beast by Tara Wray is a vulnerable exploration of the year 2020 that builds in intensity. Acting as a chronological diary of domestic scenes, the book showcases daily existence, while simultaneously touching the rural mundane with an eeriness that alludes to something darker looming out of frame.
The images begin with a clear view of the subject, portraits showcasing hands in focus, a child's smile, milk froth clinging to fur; each of these photos has a crisp singularity, but as the pages turn the focus begins to elongate and the view widens. Shadows crawl across the page and the clarity of each photo's subject grows mystified.
Image Tara Wray
Image Tara Wray
As time progresses so does the expanse present within each photograph. We the viewer are now placed at a distance, peering through shrouds as our sight becomes blocked, hazy, or obstructed. The hindrance of viewing beauty through layers builds upon the sensation of uncertainty as the photos spill into one another. Cool and warm tones mix, inciting feelings of anticipation and anxiety, that evoke the “looming specter of doom,” Wray experienced while shooting.
There is a sense of coping I feel from the book. A quiet violence that lingers off the frame but-though unseen- seeps into the images with its discontent. There is a tug of war between love and death, youth and age, and the search for balance in a time of anxious uncertainty.
Image Tara Wray
