​My name is Tamara Benarroch (b. 2005, Miami, FL), and I am an American-Colombian portrait photographer based in New York City. I am currently a second-year photography student at Parsons School of Design, set to graduate with a BFA in 2027. Since beginning my journey in a 6th-grade photography elective, photography has set my soul on fire, consuming my every thought, breath, and now, my life.​​
 

Why I Photograph

I am deeply fascinated and enamored by each shade of the collective human experience. The bliss, love, pain, darkness, confusion. I use photography to illuminate the beauty of the tangible while conceptually peeling its intangible nuanced layers. It allows me to intentionally engage with this existence, using portraiture as my oar.  

Through photoshoots, I dive headfirst into a bottomless ocean of honest, intimate conversations with those I encounter. I don’t care to first test the waters. I don’t care if the water is frigid or boiling, full of seaweed or sea monsters. So long as it’s honest, I can swim, curiously, lovingly, freely. The deeper I swim, the more alive I feel, energized by profound connection and understanding. 

This curiosity leads me to my own ocean. I am invigorated by shedding light on my darkness and untangling the sticky webs of my mind. I will eternally long to intimately understand myself and my layers, relentlessly questioning and reflecting. These photographs represent both the journey taken and the treasures uncovered. One of my firsts was my multimedia series, Infantile Amnesia, which unveiled to me the strange reality of not remembering my childhood. 

It’s most meaningful to me when I connect both bodies of water of those in my orbit with my own. Most recently, I’m investigating the experience of being a woman in the male-dominated martial arts, examining my 10-year-long journey as a woman martial artist and the women I train with, emphasizing our femininity, resilience, and complex reality. 

I must capture when I’m moved. I crave the camera’s ability to freeze time and flatten space into collectible frames, which relieves my anxiety of forgetting. In doing so, I collect life.  

Most recently, I’ve found myself capturing an array of quiet, everyday details and honest moments, often lost in the noise of life. I find this in the familiar forms of how backs curve, ears swirl, and hands fold. The subtle way a friend rests and stretches, untangles their morning hair, and holds their tea. I find this in the coffee grounds patterns that silently manifest at the bottom of my morning coffee. I cherish what lives in the in-between. It’s what’s real. 

I approach these subtleties with childlike wonder. To my delight, I mysteriously become more present when peering through the viewfinder. As my eye traces every detail in the frame, I find myself, my breath, and the moment. 

I wish for viewers to similarly notice these subtle beauties with the purpose to live intentionally, full of love, wonder, curiosity, and all the other sweet feelings we’re alive for.