Farrah Karapetian

Pay Locals

September 14 - October 24, 2026

Pay Locals, 2025

Cyanotype on rag

44 × 88 inches

111.76 × 223.52 cm

Unique

P.O.R

Farrah Karapetian is known for her cameraless photography, using performance and sculptural negatives to engage with narratives of change. She believes in the agency of individuals facing forces beyond their control, and her work poses questions about these circumstances through an experimental photographic language.

Karapetian’s series Fieldwork, which began in 2022, delves into the lives of cotton field workers in Uzbekistan, exploring their relationships with community, governance, subordination, personal freedom and both their natural and social environments. During the initial phase of Fieldwork, Karapetian asked different generations to share their memories with one another.

In her work Pay Locals, she combines multiple narratives into a single image. On the right, a field worker from a rural region carries a rucksack of cotton; on the left, two men from the city relax with cognac. Currency bills placed between them suggest the informal economy that emerged in Karapetian’s interviews, where people bussed in from outside the cities reported paying locals to fulfill their quotas.

Karapetian’s work consists of digitally collaged imagery that represents idiosyncratic moments of testimony, standing in contrast to institutional narratives. She contact-printed these images onto cotton paper for cyanotype and deployed the emulsion using a spray gun to assert her distinct, outsider authorial voice.

Farrah Karapetian lives and works in San Diego, California. She received her BA from Yale University and her MFA from UCLA. She is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of San Diego. Select solo and group exhibitions include: Como de Otro Mundo, IIC-Museo UABC Mexicali, Mexico; Sightlines, San Francisco Museum of Art; Time Share for Radical Broadcast, Performa, New York; The Fabric of Felicity, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; Light Play: Experiments in Photography, 1970 to the Present, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; A Matter of Memory, Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York; The Surface of Things, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, Texas and About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change, San Francisco Museum of Art. Karapetian was a 2018 Fulbright Scholar based in St.Petersburg, Russia and the recipient of a 2017 Pollock-Krasner Grant. Her work has been discussed in the LA Times, Artforum, Art in America, and Photograph Magazine. Her voice has been a part of panel discussions and critiques at: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Harvard University, Princeton University, UCLA, LAXART and the Orange County Museum of Art. Her work is included in the following public collections: J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.