No Adults Allowed 2001-2004

Tamara Rafkin

Artist Statement 2026

This series began over twenty-five years ago as a visual exploration of New York City’s playgrounds — spaces that are hidden within the labyrinth of concrete, glass, and crowded streets. Tucked into parks and along the edges of neighborhoods, these playgrounds were designed as places of refuge and freedom for children growing up in the intensity of the city. At the same time, they also reflect the fears of the culture around them: fenced in, gated, and marked with signs warning adults to stay out unless accompanied by a child. Even then, they felt like spaces shaped as much by anxiety and protection, as by play.

Shortly after I began photographing this series, New York City 9/11 happened, which permanently shifted both the atmosphere of the city and my understanding of the work itself. The playgrounds became visual metaphors of vulnerability, loss, and the fragile nature of innocence. What had started as an investigation into the culture’s obsession with protecting children became something more psychological and emotionally layered.

These photographs move between beauty and unease, often occupying a liminal space between a child’s perspective and an adult’s awareness. Many of the images are framed from a low or wandering point of view, while the titles carry darker double meanings that speak directly to adult fears and experiences. That tension became central to the work — the overlap between imagination and danger, memory and reality.

Although these images were created in one of the US’s busiest cities, they are marked by stillness and solitude. Looking retrospectively, I see them as reflections of the emotional isolation and disconnection during that particular moment in the city’s history. Twenty-five years later, the series has also become an archive of a New York space not usually focused on and a meditation on how these public spaces meant for childhood can quietly hold the larger fears, hopes, and anxieties of the culture surrounding them.