Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon (born February 4, 1975) is an artist who has worked in photography, text, sculpture and performance. Her practice involves extensive research, guided by an interest in systems of categorization and classification.

Simon's works have been the subject of solo exhibitions at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Tate Modern, London (2011); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2011); and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007). Her work was included in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). Permanent collections holding her work include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Simon is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives and works in New York.

Education

Simon was born in New York City. Her father and grandfather both worked extensively with image and text, as she does. She first pursued environmental sciences at Brown University but quickly transferred to a degree in art-semiotics, simultaneously taking photography classes at the neighboring Rhode Island School of Design. She received her BA in 1997.^[1] She has been a visiting artist at institutions including Yale University, Bard College, Columbia University, School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design.^[2]

Works

The Innocents (2003)

The Innocents (2003) documents the stories of individuals who were wrongly sentenced to death or life sentences, and were released due to DNA evidence.

The work calls into question photography’s function as a credible witness and arbiter of justice.

Simon has commented:

For the men and women in these photographs, the primary cause of wrongful conviction was mistaken identification. A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement’s use of photographs and lineups. [...] In our reliance upon [DNA evidence], we marginalize the majority of the wrongfully convicted, for whom there is no DNA evidence, or those for whom the cost of DNA testing is prohibitive.^[3]

This project inspired her to apply for and be awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography to travel across the United States photographing and interviewing individuals who were unfairly convicted.^[4] Simon photographed the men at sites that had particular significance to their wrongful conviction: the scene of misidentification, the scene of arrest, the scene of the crime or the scene of the alibi.^[5] 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."^[6]

Black Square (2006– )

Black Square (2006– ) is an ongoing project about the consequences of man’s inventions. To create each Black Square, 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.

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."^[7] The publication has 70 colour plates and a foreword by Salman Rushdie. Ronald Dworkin contributed a commentary, while curators Elisabeth Sussman and Tina Kukielski of the Whitney Museum of American Art contributed 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.^[8][9] 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…" ^[10]

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 Zubaidi, posed as if lying raped and burned, the victim of American soldiers. [...] Zubaidi 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 [2011]’s Venice Biennale to draw attention to Zubaidi’s situation.^[11]

De Palma and Simon discussed their work and their methods in a conversation published in Artforum:^[12]

De Palma: Look, the hard thing—I’m sure you’ve experienced this, too—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. Do you find pleasure in getting to that point of objectification?

De Palma: You know, there is no rest.

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2008-2011)

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I–XVIII was produced over four years (2008–11) during which Simon traveled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen “chapters” constituting 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 victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, 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.

Contraband (2010)

Contraband is an archive of global desires and perceived threats, presenting 1,075 images of items that were detained or seized from passengers and mail entering the United States 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. 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…^[13]

Image Atlas (2012)

Created during rhizome.org's Seven on Seven^[14] conference, Image Atlas is a collaborative project between Simon and the programmer and internet activist Aaron Swartz.^[15] Image Atlas investigates cultural differences and similarities by indexing top image results for given search terms across local engines throughout the world. Users can refine or expand their comparisons from 57 countries and sort by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or alphabetical order.^[16] 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."^[17] Image Atlas has been described as "an elegant project in that it demonstrated how something as fundamental to web interaction as "searching" is actually bound and determined by many cultural and political forces."^[18] 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."^[19]

Picture Collection (2012)

The Picture Collection (2013) was inspired by the New York Public Library’s picture archive, which contains 1.2 million prints, postcards, posters, and printed images. It is the largest circulating picture library in the world, organized according to a complex cataloging system of over 12,000 subject headings. Simon sees this archive of as a precursor to Internet search engines. In The Picture Collection, she highlights the human impulse to archive and organize visual information, and points to the invisible hands behind seemingly neutral systems of image gathering. 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 body of work, whose title is taken from the definitive taxonomy of the same name by the American ornithologist James Bond. Ian Fleming, an active bird watcher, used the author’s name for his novels’ protagonist. This co-opting of names was the first in a series of substitutions and replacements that would become central to the construction of the Bond narrative. The first element of the work is a photographic inventory of the women, weapons and vehicles of James Bond films made over the past fifty years. This visual database of interchangeable variables used in the production of fantasy examines the economic and emotional value generated by their repetition. In the second element of the work, Simon casts herself as the ornithologist James Bond, identifying, photographing, and classifying all the birds that appear within the 24 films of the James Bond franchise. Simon’s discoveries often occupy a space between reality and fiction: confined within the fictional space of the James Bond universe and yet wholly separate from it.

A Polite Fiction (2014)

In A Polite Fiction (2014), Simon maps, excavates, and records the gestures that became entombed beneath – and within – the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s surfaces during its five-year construction. Designed by Frank Gehry, it was built to house the art collection of Bernard Arnault, one of the world’s wealthiest individuals and owner of the largest luxury conglomerate in the world. Simon collects this buried history and examines the latent social, political, and economic forces pushing against power and privilege.

Publications

• The Innocents. New York: Umbrage, 2003. 2nd ed., New York: Umbrage, 2004
• An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. Exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art. Göttingen: Steidl, 2007. 2nd ed., Göttingen: Steidl, 2008. 3rd ed., Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012
• Contraband. Göttingen: Steidl/New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2010. 2nd ed., Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2015
• A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII. Exhibition catalogue, Tate Modern/Neue Nationalgalerie. Berlin/London: Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen/Mack, 2011. 2nd ed., London/New York: Wilson Center of Photography/Gagosian Gallery, 2012
• Birds of the West Indies. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013
• Rear Views, A Star-Forming Nebula, and the Department of Foreign Propaganda. London: Tate Publishing, 2015
• The Picture Collection. Paris: Edition Cahiers d'Art, 2015

Public collections

Simon's work is held in the following public collections:

• Centre Pompidou, Paris^[20]
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA^[21]
• J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles ^[22]
• Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York^[23]
• Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
• Museum of Modern Art, New York
• National Media Museum, Bradford, United Kingdom
• Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
• San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, CA
• Tate Modern, London
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Exhibitions

• Kunst-werke, Berlin, Germany, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents (and other works)" (2003).
• MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York, USA, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents" (2003).^[24]
• Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen, Denmark, Taryn Simon: "The Innocents" (2004).
• Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents" (2004).
• Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents" (2006).^[25]
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, "Taryn Simon: Nonfiction" (2006).
• Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, The Documentary Factor, (2006).
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA, "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2007).^[26]
• Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2007).
• The Photographer's Gallery, London, United Kingdom, "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2007).
• The 7th Gwangju Biennale Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions, Gwangju, South Korea, (2008).
• FOAM, Fotografie Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2008).
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA, “Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography”, (2008).
• Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar", (2009).
• Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland, “Political/Minimal”, (2009).
• Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France, (2009).
• Christchurch Art Gallery, New Zealand "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2010).^[27]
• Lever House, New York, NY, “Contraband”, (2010).^[28]
• Les Rencontres d'Arles, France.^[29]
• Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin "Taryn Simon: Photographs and Texts", 2011.^[30]
• Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Genève, Switzerland, "Taryn Simon: Contraband" (2011).^[31]
• Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany, "Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Others Chapters I - IVIII" (2011).^[32]
• Helsinki Art Museum, "Taryn Simon: Photographs and Texts", 2012.^[33]
• Moscow House of Photography, Moscow, Russia, “Taryn Simon", 2011.^[34]
• Tate Modern, London, England, “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters”, 2011.^[35]
• Danish Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, Speech Matters, 2011.
• Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland, "Taryn Simon: Photographs and Texts", 2012.^[36]
• Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, "Taryn Simon: Photographs and Texts", 2012.^[37]
• The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, "Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Others Chapters I - IVIII" (2012).
• Museum of Modern Art, New York, "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters", 2012.^[38]
• Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, "Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I - IVIII", (2013).^[39]
• The Pavilion Downtown, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, "Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I - IVIII", (2013).
• Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, "Taryn Simon: There are Some Who Are in Darkness", (2013).^[40]
• Ullens Center of Contemporary Art, Beijing, China, "Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I - IVIII", (2013).^[41]
• Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, "Taryn Simon: Birds of the West Indies" (2013).^[42]
• Fondation Louis Vuitton, paris, France, "Taryn Simon: A Polite Fiction" (2014).^[43]
• MOCAK - Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, Kraków, Poland, "Taryn Simon: The Picture Collection", (2014).
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, "Now You See It: Photography and Concealement", (2014).
• Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, Conflict, Time, Photography", (2014).
• Le Point du Jour, Cherbourg, France, Taryn Simon: : A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I - IVIII", (2015).
• Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, "Taryn Simon: Rear Views, A Star-Forming Nebula and the Office of Foreign Propaganda", (2015).^[44]

Awards and nominations

• 1999: The Alfred Eisenstaedt Award in Photography, Columbia University, New York.
• 2001: Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, New York.
• 2007: KLM Paul Huf Award, Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam.
• 2008: Silver Medal Lead Award, Germany.
• 2008: International Center of Photography Infinity Award for publication, New York.
• 2009: Deutsche Börse Photography Prize Finalist.
• 2010: Discovery Award at Rencontres d'Arles, Provence, France.
• 2011: Author Book Award at Rencontres d'Arles, Provence, France.
• 2011: Contemporary Book Award, Rencontres d'Arles, Provence, France, for A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters.^[45]

References

External links

• Official website
• Image Atlas
• Taryn Simon: “Behind Closed Doors”, New York Times Magazine, 17 December 2006
• An interview with Taryn Simon on Charlie Rose, 16 March 2007
• “Lens Crafters”, Time Magazine, 29 May 2008
• Christy Lange: “Access All Areas”, Frieze, Issue 115, May 2008
• “Freedom Row”, New York Times, slideshow with photographs and text by Taryn Simon, 24 January 2008
• Taryn Simon, Interview Magazine
• Taryn Simon's talk at TED, July 2009
• An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, IMA Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, 2009
• An interview with Taryn Simon on Late Night Live, 9 November 2010
• TateShots: Taryn Simon. The artist talks about her exhibition A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, 3 June 2011
• “Case Studies”, Art in America by Camille Xin regarding Simon's MoMA exhibition A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, 1 May 2012
• A further interview on Charlie Rose about A Living Man Dead..., 25 June 2012
• Profile in W Magazine