Taryn SimonReviews

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 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. Each work in A Living Man Declared Dead comprises three segments. On the left of each chapter are one or more large portrait panels systematically ordering a number of individuals directly related by blood. The sequence of portraits is structured to include the living ascendants and descendants of a single individual. The portraits are followed by a central text panel in which the artist constructs narratives and collects details. On the right are Simon’s ‘footnote images’ representing fragmented pieces of the established narratives and providing photographic evidence. The empty portraits represent living members of a bloodline who could not be photographed. The reasons for these absences are included in the text panels and include imprisonment, military service, dengue fever and women not granted permission to be photographed for religious and social reasons. Simon’s presentation explores the struggle to determine codes and patterns embedded in the narratives she documents, making them recognizable as variations (versions, renderings, adaptations) of archetypal episodes from the present, past, and future. In contrast to the methodical ordering of a bloodline, the central elements of the stories – violence, resilience, corruption, and survival – disorient the highly structured appearance of the work. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII highlights the space between text and image, absence and presence, and order and disorder.

Taryn Simon lived in John F Kennedy International Airport from November 16 through November 20, 2009. JFK processes more international passengers than any other airport in the United States. Contraband includes photographs taken 24 hours a day of over 1000 items detained or seized from passengers and express mail entering the U.S. from abroad. Over five days, in both the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the U.S. Postal Service International Mail Facility, Simon documented items including counterfeit American Express travelers checks, overproof Jamaican rum, heroin, a dead hawk, an illegal Mexican passport, deer penis, purses made from endangered species, Cuban cigars, counterfeit Disney DVDs, khat, gold dust, GHB concealed as house cleaner, cow manure tooth powder, counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags, prohibited sausage, undeclared jewelry, steroids and an ostrich egg.

This catalog presents an edited version, selected by the artist, from the more than 1000 items she recorded.

In her monograph, An Occupation of Loss, artist Taryn Simon creates a detailed record of her years researching professional mourning, culminating in a seminal performance at the Park Avenue Armory, co-produced by Artangel, in 2016. During the installation, professional mourners simultaneously broadcast their lamentations within a monumental sculptural setting, enacting rituals of grief. The installation combined performance, sound, and architecture to consider the anatomy of grief and the intricate systems we use to manage fate and uncertainty. The book leads the reader through the complicated visa application process for the mourners invited to enter the United States, revealing the underlying structures governing global exchange, the movement of bodies, and the hierarchies of art and culture. An Occupation of Loss, presented by Artangel, will premiere in London in 2018.

Edited by Aliza Watters.

Taryn Simon’s The Color of a Flea’s Eye presents a history of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection—a legendary trove of more than one million prints, photographs, postcards, posters and images from disused books and periodicals. Since its inception in 1915, the Picture Collection has been a vital resource for writers, historians, artists, filmmakers, fashion designers and advertising agencies.

In her work The Picture Collection (2012-20), Simon (born 1975) highlighted the impulse to organize visual information, and pointed to the invisible hands behind seemingly neutral systems of image gathering. Each of Simon’s photographs is made up of an array of images selected from a given subject folder, such as Chiaroscuro, Handshaking, Haircombing, Express Highways, Financial Panics, Israel, and Beards and Mustaches. In artfully overlapped compositions, only slices of the individual images are visible, each fragment suggesting its whole. Simon sees this extensive archive of images as the precursor to internet search engines. Such an unlikely futurity in the past is at the core of the Picture Collection. The digital is foreshadowed in the analogue, at the same time that history—its classifications, its contents—seems the stuff of projection.

Simon spent years sifting through letters, memos and records that reveal an untold story between the library and artists, media, government and a broader public. These documents also divulge the removal and transfer of photographs from the democratically circulating picture-collection folders to the photography collection in the late 1980s when their marketplace value became apparent. Simon’s selection of photographs from these transfers highlights gender, immigration, race and economy in America alongside the technical development of photography.

I hope I go to neither heaven nor hell. I wish that at the time of my death that I could go to sleep and never wake up and never have a bad dream.

These are the words of Ron Williamson, a man who served eleven years of a death sentence for a brutal rape and murder that he didn't commit. One of 47 people profiled in The Innocents, all wrongly convicted of brutal crimes, and all cleared by post-conviction DNA testing, Williamson's words speak to the terrible scars left by these miscarriages of justice.

Each profile includes a photograph by Taryn Simon, usually at some significant location like the scene of the crime or the arrest; commentary on the case by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, whose organization The Innocence Project has played such a crucial role in winning each individual's exoneration; and a brief statement from the wrongfully convicted man or woman.

This is a sobering book, not because it highlights mistakes within our criminal justice system, but because it makes a powerful statement about the nature of those mistakes. Many of the innocents are African-American, some of them are developmentally or psychologically disabled, and almost all of them are poor. The class biases of the legal system, in which unequal access to good counsel and technology help to facilitate wrongful convictions, as well as the fundamentally flawed nature of the identification process, quickly become apparent to the reader.

I was horrified to discover that so many of the cases profiled here were NOT the result of good-faith mistakes, but the product of deliberate and willful indifference on the part of investigators and prosecutors, who ignored or suppressed any evidence that did not fit their (incorrect) theories of the crime. Take the case of Tim Durham, sentenced to 3,220 years in prison for the rape of an eleven-year-old girl, despite the fact that he had 11 alibi witnesses who could place him at a shooting competition at the time of the crime. Or Marvin Anderson, who served 15 years of a 210-year sentence, despite the fact that the real perpetrator confessed five years after his conviction.

Finally, I was particularly struck, while reading The Innocents, by the fact that almost every one of these cases involved the brutal rape of a woman or child. I found myself, as a woman, trying to imagine being the victim of such a heinous crime, of enduring the trauma of testifying about it in public, only to discover years later that my attacker was not who I thought it was. And then I found myself trying to imagine being falsely accused of such a crime, of pleading my innocence to the indifferent or hostile powers-that-be, of being imprisoned for a crime I didn't commit, of being freed years later, and dumped out into the world with no assistance.

There were two sets of crimes here, and as I perused this powerful collection of photographs and stories, I kept thinking that these men were the victims of both crimes. Yes, they were railroaded by a legal system that was stacked against them. But they were also ensnared by a culture that permits widespread violence against women. I find that heartbreaking.