Taryn Simon Interview: Archives, Photography, and the Limits of Truth

Taryn Simon, born 1975 in New York, discusses her practice centered on archives and the role of photographic devices within institutions, revealing the devastating effect of image misinterpretation. Her projects include The Innocents (2003), photographing wrongfully imprisoned individuals at crime-related locations; An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), documenting normally prohibited sites like a nuclear waste storage center and a Scientology VIP section; Contraband (2010), cataloging 1,075 items seized by JFK customs over five days in 2009; A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (2008-2011), a series of eighteen chapters on bloodlines combining portrait grids, texts, and footnotes; and Black Square (2012), photographs in a frame matching Malevich's Black Square (1915), covering themes like antisemitic forgeries and genetically modified mosquitoes. Simon emphasizes that her work is driven by facts, conceptual necessities, and feeling, not scientific method. She views photography as a collecting machine and avoids categories. A Living Man Declared Dead is currently on view at the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg until March 17, after presentations at MoMA New York, MoCA Los Angeles, Corcoran Gallery of Art Washington, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and Tate Modern London. Black Square was shown at Gagosian Gallery Athens in fall 2012. The interview was conducted by Eleanor Heartney, translated by Stéphane Roth.