Monday’s Muse: Taryn Simon

You have to love an artist who dedicates their practice to unravelling the world’s dirtiest secrets. Gaining entrance to places as diverse as a white tiger breeding facility, the JFK Airport quarantine area, abortion clinics and virus-research labs, Taryn Simon amplifies the things that are integral to America’s foundation, mythology and daily functioning, but have remained inaccessible or unknown to a public audience.

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII is a series of photographs that stretch beyond documentation. At first glance they appear uniform, but looking through the work’s mapped out structure, a mysterious, unsettling feeling sets in.

Produced over a four year period (2008–11) Simon and her small team travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines, (including 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) and the way in which their stories relate. Territory, power, religion, and circumstance, chance and fate all start to reveal themselves, both psychologically and physically.

It’s a selfless mission. Questioning the assumed, striving to unearth the truth, for, in some cases, no real answer.

“There is no end result. There is only disorientation or the unknown. It’s an equation that folds out on itself again and again. X+Y does not equal something. It doesn’t equal infinity either. It just mutates into another question.”

American photographer Taryn Simon talks about, ‘A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII’ in this video below.