The Jeu de Paume in Paris is holding a retrospective of the work of New York photographer Taryn Simon, winner of the Prix Découverte at the 2010 Rencontres d’Arles festival.
In the series on display in Paris, Taryn Simon unites images and text to explore the complexity of the world through an inventory of disturbing details.
Her research and approach put her in the category of “post-9/11” photographers. In 2002 she first exhibited The Innocent, a series commissioned by the New York Times Magazine. It was a gallery of wrongfully convicted former inmates who had served long terms in prison before being exonerated by DNA testing.
Simon photographed her subjects at the scene of the crime or where they were arrested, reality and fiction blurring in the viewer’s mind. Photographing them where the crime was committed—where some of them had never even set foot—therein lies the radical nature of the process, since the subjects are now forever tied to the story.
What fascinates Simon is photography’s inherent power to communicate both ambiguity and certainty. In the cases in question, the fateful error is the result of witnesses misidentifying the subjects in photographs shown to them by the police. Simon raises questions about the role of the photographic process and the dangers of misinterpreting an image. She explores how the witness can be misled by the different pictures—polaroids, ID photographs, police records—they are shown of a man resembling the perpetrator, versus how they are seen during the line-up. For the witness, this photograph stands in for the place of the actual scene of the crime.
Later, in the series A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, presented as a triptych and previously exhibited at the Tate Modern, Simon explores the bloodlines of three different families: that of an Indian man declared dead, a mother whose four children were killed in the Srebrenica massacre, and the descendants of Adolf Hitler’s lawyer.
To the left are portraits of family members in the order of their birth, like a family tree. Some of the frames are empty, due either to their death or to their refusal to be photographed. In the central part of the triptych are the captions to the images and a summary of the story. To the right, an “exhibition” of evidence as a reflection and documentation of the events.
Simon’s investigation brought her to more than 20 countries over the course of four years. She has developed a rigorous, almost mathematical approach, one capable of governing human stories, where the text is as important as the image.
In the next series, An American Index of the Hidden and the Unfamiliar, we see artworks hanging in the impersonal corridors of a government agency, a young woman undergoing a hymenoplasty, a caged tiger held for selective breeding, and a decomposing body waiting to be studied in a forensic medicine complex. The subject here isn’t famously inaccessible sites, but rather places few people know about. A large part of Simon’s work that remains totally invisible and unquantifiable results primarily from obtaining permission to photograph and document it. She spent five days following a customs patrol team at JFK Airport in New York, resulting in 1075 portraits, part of which are exhibited at the Jeu de Paume in a meticulous order.
The exhibition ends with her most recent work, shot at the New York Public Library. From over a million visual documents distributed among 12,000 files, Simon selected a few, spread them out on the ground and rephotographed their content. On each large-format image are headings like “postcards,” “pools,” “highways” and the famous “rear views” from which the title of the exhibition was taken and which sheds light on the subject: women’s rear ends, American soldiers and, in a long central display case, the documentation requests received by the library, serving as a visual approach to a timeless archival process that prefigures today’s search engines using keywords, plunging the viewer into an array of images that sometimes have little to do with each other.
EXHIBITION
Taryn Simon: Vues Arrière, nébuleuse stellaire et le bureau de propagande extérieure
Until May 17th, 2015
Jeu de Paume
1 Place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
France
