Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII
May 2–September 3, 2012
The Robert and Joyce Menschel Photography Gallery, third floor
The work was produced over a four-year period (2008–11), during which the artist travelled around the world researching and documenting bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the 18 “chapters” that make up the work, external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects Simon documents include 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. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.
Taryn Simon (born 1975) is an American photographer. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. She was born in New York.