Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon’s earliest body of work, The Innocents (2003), documents stories of individuals who were incarcerated for violent crimes they did not commit. The project stands as a photographic record of some of the earliest DNA-based exonerations in the United States and as a searing indictment of America’s criminal legal system.
The Innocents interrogates photography’s credibility as an arbiter of justice. People suspected of committing crimes are identified through photographs and lineups, a procedure that relies on the assumption of precise visual memory. But through exposure to composite sketches, mug shots, Polaroids and lineups, eyewitness memory can change. In the cases in this book, photography aided in convicting and imprisoning people for crimes they did not commit. The Innocents compiles Simon’s photographs of 46 individuals at sites that had particular significance to their convictions: the scene of the crime, misidentification, arrest or alibi.
This expanded edition includes previously unpublished images; a new introduction by Innocence Project cofounders Peter J. Neufeld and Barry C. Scheck; a new essay by professor and curator Nicole R. Fleetwood based on a conversation with criminal legal and social justice activist Tyra Patterson; as well as police reports, court transcripts and correspondence detailing the procedures behind many of the misidentifications and wrongful convictions in this book.

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.

Produced in direct collaboration with the artist, the book contains 57 individually hand tipped-in plates, numerous gatefolds and a variety of unique papers, as well as essays by Joshua Chuang, head of The New York Public Library’s Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, and Tim Griffin, executive director and chief curator at The Kitchen.

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 (born 1975) has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Tate Modern, London (2011); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2011); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007). Her work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Georges Pompidou and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and was included in the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 and the Carnegie International in 2013. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Simon lives and works in New York.