Taryn Simon (born February 4, 1975) is an American multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, text, sculpture, and performance.
Currently residing and maintaining a studio practice in New York City, Simon has had work featured in the Venice Biennale (2015). In 2001, Simon was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow.
Early life and education Simon was born in New York City and attended Brown University, where she initially studied environmental studies before graduating with a degree in art semiotics. While at Brown, she enrolled in photography classes at the neighboring Rhode Island School of Design. She received her BA in 1997."Taryn Simon", Yale University School of Art, New Haven. Simon's father traveled frequently for his government position, and was an enthusiastic photographer, opening her up to the art form.
Works
The Innocents (2002) In 2000, Simon was given an assignment by New York Times Magazine to photograph men who had been wrongfully convicted, which inspired her to explore photography's role in the criminal justice system. She applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship which allowed her to travel across the United States photographing and interviewing individuals who were wrongfully convicted. The Innocents depicts individuals sentenced to death or given life sentences largely due to mistaken identity, who were exonerated and released after DNA evidence proved their innocence. Simon photographed the subjects at sites significant to their wrongful conviction, such as the scene of the crime, misidentification, alibi, or arrest. The series was published as a book and exhibited in galleries and museums such as MoMA PS1, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Gagosian Gallery, and others.
In Simon's foreword to the book she writes:
Photography's ability to blur truth and fiction is one if its most compelling qualities... Photographs in the criminal justice system, and elsewhere, can turn fiction into fact. As I got to know the men and women in this book, I saw that photography's ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another."The Innocents, Umbrage Editions, 2003
Black Square (2006– )
Simon's website says of Black Square:
Black Square (2006–) is an ongoing project in which Simon collects objects, documents, and individuals within a black field that has precisely the same measurements as Kazimir Malevich's 1915 suprematist work of the same name."Black Square", Taryn Simon's website. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
It is about the consequences of man’s inventions.
In an interview with Kate Fowle of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Simon described the first sculptural iteration of the project, Black Square XVII:
The goal was to construct a black square made from vitrified nuclear waste that would hold within it a letter that I had written to the future. The process of vitrification converts radioactive waste from a volatile liquid to a stable, solid mass resembling polished black glass. It is considered to be one of the safest and most effective methods for the long-term storage and neutralization of radioactive waste.
The waste is stored in a steel container reinforced with concrete, at a radon nuclear waste disposal plant outside of Moscow. It will remain at the radon facility, Simon explained, "until its radioactive properties have diminished to levels deemed safe for human exposure and exhibition—approximately one thousand years after its creation."
An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007)
An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar reveals objects, sites, and spaces that are integral to America's foundation, mythology, or daily functioning but remain inaccessible or unknown to a public audience. These unseen subjects range from radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility to a black bear in hibernation to the art collection of the CIA. Simon has stated that she "wanted to confront the divide between public and expert access."Art Forum, Summer 2012
The book has 70 colour plates and a foreword by Salman Rushdie. Ronald Dworkin wrote a commentary, while curators Elisabeth Sussman and of the Whitney Museum of American Art wrote an introduction. It was published by Steidl and exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2006. In 2007 it was on view at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany. She discussed the project with photography historian Geoffrey Batchen for the 8th volume of Museo.
Salman Rushdie wrote:
In a historical period in which many people are making such great efforts to conceal the truth from the mass of the people, an artist like Taryn Simon is an invaluable counter-force. Democracy needs visibility, accountability, light… Somehow, Simon has persuaded a good few denizens of hidden worlds not to scurry for shelter when the light is switched on, as cockroaches and vampires do, but to pose proudly for her invading lens…"
Zahra/Farah (2008/2009/2011) Brian De Palma asked Simon to take the photograph that is the last shot of his 2007 film Redacted. She traveled to Jordan to shoot a young Iraqi actress, Zahra Alzubaidi, posed as if lying raped and burned, the victim of American soldiers. [...] Alzubaidi has received death threats from family members, who consider Redacted pornographic, and is seeking asylum in the U.S. Simon arranged for the photograph to be shown at ’s Venice Biennale to draw attention to Zubaidi’s situation.Joan Juliet Buck (November 2011), "Taryn’s World" , W.
De Palma and Simon discussed their work and methods in a conversation published in Artforum:Art Forum, vol. 50, no. 10, summer 2012, page 249.
De Palma: Look, the hard thing . . . is that once you have a project, you think about how you’re going to photograph the scene until you actually do it. I have always felt that the camera view is just as important as what’s in front of the camera. Consequently, I’m obsessed with how I’m shooting the scene. When you’re making a movie, you think about it all the time—you’re dreaming about it, you wake up with ideas in the middle of the night—until you actually go there and shoot it. You have these ideas that are banging around in your head, but once you objectify them and lock them into a photograph or cinema sequence, then they get away from you. They’re objectified; they no longer haunt you.
Simon: The haunting can be torturous. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the making of my work. It’s a labor.
A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2008-2011)
Simon's website says of A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I–XVIII:
was produced over a four-year period (2008–2011), during which Simon traveled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen 'chapters' that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include: the Zionist and Jewish establishments in Pre-Israel Palestine, feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein's son Uday, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate."A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII", Taryn Simon's website. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
It probes complex narratives in contemporary politics and organizes this material within a system that connects identity, lineage, history, and memory.
In The Washington Post, Philip Kennicott wrote:
Simon’s chapters, although seemingly dry and archival, emerge as remarkably profound meditations on how we sort through the world, what ethical and moral impulses we honor and which ones we squelch. Her work insists on a more fundamentally rational relationship to photographs, and especially to photographs of people."
Contraband (2010) Contraband is "an archive of global desires and perceived threats, encompassing 1,075 images of items that were detained or seized from airline passengers and postal mail entering the United States""Taryn Simon. A Soldier is Taught to Bayonet the Enemy and not Some Undefined Abstraction", Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2016. Retrieved 3 August 2017. from abroad, "taken at both the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the U.S. Postal Service International Mail Facility at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York.""Contraband", Taryn Simon's website. Retrieved 3 August 2017. From November 16 through 20, 2009, Simon "remained at JFK and continuously photographed items detained or seized from passengers and express mail entering the United States from abroad."
Simon’s images and lists embrace both order and disorder, and open up a third space within the cracks of these forms of control: a space of the surreptitious, the forgotten, the bizarre and the banal, exposed to the cold light of the camera…Hans Ulrich Obrist. Contraband. Göttingen: Steidl; New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2010, p. 11.
Image Atlas (2012) Created during rhizome.org's Seven on Seven conference, Image Atlas is a collaborative project between Simon and the programmer and internet activist Aaron Swartz. Image Atlas "investigates cultural differences and similarities by indexing top image results for given search terms across local engines throughout the world. Visitors can refine or expand their comparisons from the 57 countries currently available, and sort by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or alphabetical order"."Image Atlas", Taryn Simon's website. Retrieved 4 August 2017. In an extensive article on the Seven on Seven conference Ben Davis writes that "Simon suggested that the site might cut against 'the illusion of flattening' on the Web, offering some way of recovering a sense of the local." Curator Lauren Cornell, Adjunct Curator and former Director of Rhizome stated, "The Image Atlas proposes a singular method of retrieving and comparing pictures, to demonstrate the difference in a world supposedly flattened by the forces of the global economy."
Picture Collection (2013)
The Picture Collection (2013) was inspired by the New York Public Library’s picture archive, which contains "1.29 million prints, postcards, posters, and images", and is "the largest circulating picture library in the world", "[o]rganized by a complex cataloguing system of more than 12,000 subject headings". Simon sees this archive as a precursor to Internet search engines. In The Picture Collection, she "highlights the impulse to archive and organize visual information, and points to the invisible hands behind seemingly neutral systems of image gathering"."The Picture Collection", Taryn Simon's website. Retrieved 4 August 2017. It was developed in response to the online database Image Atlas (2012), created by Simon with computer programmer Aaron Swartz.
Birds of the West Indies (2013–14)
Simon’s Birds of the West Indies (2013–14) is a two-part work, whose title is taken from the "definitive taxonomy" of the same name by the American ornithologist James Bond. Author Ian Fleming, "an active bird-watcher living in Jamaica", used Bond's name for his novels’ protagonist. "This co-opting of a name was the first in a series of substitutions and replacements that would become central to the construction of the Bond narrative.""Birds of the West Indies", Taryn Simon's website. Retrieved 4 August 2017.