Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon (born February 4, 1975) is an American multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, text, sculpture, and performance.

She received her BA in 1997.

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.'"

Simon's website says of Black Square:

In 2001, Simon was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow.

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.

"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."

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 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."

The book has 70 colour plates and a foreword by Salman Rushdie.

Ronald Dworkin wrote a commentary, while curators Elisabeth Sussman and Tina Kukielski 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…'"

"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."

De Palma and Simon discussed their work and methods in a conversation published in Artforum:

"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."

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."

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 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" 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."

Currently residing and maintaining a studio practice in New York City, Simon has had work featured in the Venice Biennale (2015).