Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon (born February 4, 1975) is an American multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, text, sculpture, and performance.
Currently residing and maintaining a studio practice in New York City, Simon has had work featured in the Venice Biennale (2015). 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. 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:
Simon's website says of Black Square:
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 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:
De Palma and Simon discussed their work and methods in a conversation published in Artforum:
Simon's website says of A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I–XVIII:
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:
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." 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."
Created during rhizome.org's Seven on Seven conference, Image Atlas is a collaborative project between Simon and the programmer and internet activist Aaron Swartz. Image Atlas "investigates cultural differences and similarities by indexing top image results for given search terms across local engines throughout the world. Visitors can refine or expand their comparisons from the 57 countries currently available, and sort by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or alphabetical order". 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." 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."
The Picture Collection (2013) was inspired by the New York Public Library’s picture archive, which contains "1.29 million prints, postcards, posters, and images", and is "the largest circulating picture library in the world", "[o]rganized by a complex cataloguing system of more than 12,000 subject headings". Simon sees this archive as a precursor to Internet search engines. In The Picture Collection, she "highlights the 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.
Simon’s Birds of the West Indies (2013–14) is a two-part work, whose title is taken from the "definitive taxonomy" of the same name by the American ornithologist James Bond. Author Ian Fleming, "an active bird-watcher living in Jamaica", used Bond's name for his novels’ protagonist. "This co-opting of a name was the first in a series of substitutions and replacements that would become central to the construction of the Bond narrative."
Simon's website says of A Polite Fiction (2014):
The photographs and sculptures of Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) take as their subject matter the signings of political accords, contracts, treaties, and decrees in which powerful men flank floral centerpieces curated to convey the importance of the signatories and the institutions they represent. The signings that inform Paperwork and the Will of Capital involve the countries present at the 1944 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which addressed the globalization of economies after World War II. This led to the establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
Teju Cole wrote for The New York Times Magazine:
According to Simon's website, in An Occupation of Loss (2016):
Within a monumental sculptural setting, An Occupation of Loss combines performance, sound, and architecture and:
An Occupation of Loss was co-commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory and Artangel.
Jerry Saltz described his experience of the performance and installation:
He describes mixed feelings of intrusion and empathy as he listens to the mourners' expression of inconsolable grief.
Simon's work is held in the following public collections:
Simon has been married to director Jake Paltrow since 2010. The couple has two children. They live in New York's Greenwich Village.