Taryn Simon is an American photographer. She is a graduate of Brown University

Brown University

Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

 and a Guggenheim Fellow. She was born in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

.

Her photography and writing have been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts including the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

, CNN

CNN

Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...

, BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

, Frontline, and NPR

NPR

NPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...

. Simon has been a visiting artist at institutions including Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, Bard College

Bard College

Bard College, founded in 1860 as "St. Stephen's College", is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.-Location:...

, Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, School of Visual Arts

School of Visual Arts

The School of Visual Arts , is a proprietary art school located in Manhattan, New York City, and is widely considered to be one of the leading art schools in the United States. It was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and...

, and Parsons School of Design.

Major works

Her series The Innocents documents cases of wrongful conviction in the United States and investigates the role of photography in that process. Her series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar documents a diverse range of subjects within the United States that are largely unknown to its citizens. Contraband consists of 1,075 images of items that were detained or seized from passengers and mail entering the United States from abroad. Her latest work, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, documents 18 bloodlines and their related stores. Simon is also known for her photographs documenting international regions in turmoil.

The Innocents (2003)

The Innocents documents the stories of individuals who were wrongly sentenced to death or life sentences, and were released due to DNA evidence. It focuses on the role of photographs in these convictions. Taryn Simon commented: "For the men and women in these photographs, the primary cause of wrongful conviction was mistaken identification. A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement’s use of photographs and lineups. [...] In our reliance upon [DNA evidence], we marginalize the majority of the wrongfully convicted, for whom there is no DNA evidence, or those for whom the cost of DNA testing is prohibitive."

Nonfiction (2006)

Nonfiction was a series of portraits and documentary images made in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Indonesia, Cuba, and the United States.

An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007)

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. .

The publication features 70 colour plates and a foreword by Salman Rushdie. Ronald Dworkin

Ronald Dworkin

Ronald Myles Dworkin, QC, FBA is an American philosopher and scholar of constitutional law. He is Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, and has taught previously at Yale Law School and the...

 contributed a commentary, while curators Elisabeth Sussman and Tina Kukielski of the Whitney Museum of American Art

Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...

 contributed an introduction. It was published by Steidl

Steidl

Steidl is a German-language publisher, an international publisher of photobooks, and a printing company, based in Göttingen, Germany.The company was started by Gerhard Steidl...

 and exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2006. As of late 2007 it was on view at the Museum für Moderne Kunst

Museum für Moderne Kunst

The Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main was founded in 1981. The museum was designed by the Viennese architect Hans Hollein. Because of its triangular shape, it is called "piece of cake"....

 in Frankfurt, Germany. She discussed the project with photography historian Geoffrey Batchen for the 8th volume of Museo.

Contraband (2010)

Contraband is an archive of global desires and perceived threats, presenting 1,075 images of items that were detained or seized from passengers and 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, 2009 through November 20, 2009, Taryn Simon remained on site at JFK and continuously photographed items detained or seized from passengers and express mail entering the United States from abroad.

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I – XVIII (2011)

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters was produced over a four-year period (2008–11), during which the Simon travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen ‘chapters’ that make up the work, the 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.

Collections

• Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Centre Pompidou, Paris
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
• San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, CA
• Tate Modern, London
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• Goetz Collection, Germany
• J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art
• Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany
• Nation Media Museum, Bradford, United Kingdom

Exhibitions

• Museum of Modern Art, New York, "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters" (2012)
• Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany, “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters” (2011)
• Venice Biennale, Danish Pavilion, Venice, Italy, “Taryn Simon” (2011)
• Tate Modern, London, England, “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters” (2011)
• Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, “Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” (2011)
• Moscow House of Photography, Moscow, Russia, “Taryn Simon” (2011)
• Taryn Simon, Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland
• Taryn Simon, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Les Rencontres d'Arles, France.
• Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels, Belgium, “Contraband”, (2010) http://www.alminerech.com/fr/upcoming/19/Contraband
• Lever House, New York, NY, “Contraband”, (2010) http://leverhouseartcollection.com/#/home
• Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, “Contraband” (2010) http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2010-09-22_taryn-simon/
• Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia, "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2010)
• Christchurch Art Gallery, New Zealand "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2010)
• Centre Pompidou Musee National D'art Moderne, Paris, France, (2009)
• Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland, “Political/Minimal”, (2009)
• Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, USA, "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2008) http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2008-09-13_taryn-simon/
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA, “Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography”, (2008)
• FOAM, Fotografie Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2008)
• The 7th Gwangju Biennale Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions, Gwangju, South Korea, (2008)
• Galerie Almine Rech, Paris, France, "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar " (2008)
• Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2007)
• The Photographer’s Gallery, London, England "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2007) http://www.photonet.org.uk/index.php?pxid=852
• The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA, "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2007) http://www.whitney.org/www/exhibition/past.jsp
• Art Foyer, DZ Bank, Frankfurt, Germany, "Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" (2007)
• Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, The Documentary Factor, (2006)
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, "Taryn Simon: Nonfiction" (2006)
• Provisions Library, Washington, D.C., USA, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents, Portraits" (2006) http://microsites.provisionslibrary.org/Innocents_site/intro.html
• Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents" (2006) http://contemporaryartscenter.org/exhibitions/simon
• Musée de L'Elysée, Lausanne, France, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents" (2006)
• Museum of Contemporary Photography
  Museum of Contemporary Photography
  The Museum of Contemporary Photography was founded in 1984 by Columbia College Chicago. It is well known for an active program and curating which discovers many emerging and mid-career artists...
  
  , Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois, USA "Taryn Simon: The Innocents" (2005) http://www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2005/08/taryn_simon_the.php
• Museum Jan Cunen, Oss, Netherlands, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents", (2005) http://www.museumjancunen.nl/nl/Tentoonstellingen/Gemist/The_Innocents/default.aspx
• Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen, Denmark, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents" (2004) http://www.kunstaspekte.de/index.php?tid=10063&action=termin
• Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, USA, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents" (2004) http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/beverly-hills-2004-06-taryn-simon/
• Gagosian Gallery, London England "Taryn Simon: The Innocents" (2004) http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/heddon-street-2004-06-taryn-simon/
• Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents" (2004)
• P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York, USA, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents" (2003) http://ps1.org/exhibitions/view/54
• Kunst-werke, Berlin, Germany, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents (and other works)" (2003)
• The Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, USA, "Taryn Simon: The Innocents, Portraits" (2003)
• Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University, North Carolina, USA, "Taryn Simon: Portraits" (2003) http://cds.aas.duke.edu/exhibits/innocentspast.html

Awards and nominations

• Author Book Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles, Provence, France (2011)
• Discovery Award at Les Recontres d’Arles, Provence, France (2010)
• Deutsche Börse Photography Prize Finalist (2009)
• International Center for Photography Infinity Award for publication, New York (2008)
• Silver Medal Lead Award, Germany (2008)
• KLM Paul Huf Award, FOAM-Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam (2007)
• Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography, New York (2001)
• The Alfred Eisenstaedt Award in Photography, Columbia University, New York (1999)

Further reading

• Taryn Simon: The Innocents, Umbrage Editions, June 2003 (ISBN 9781884167188)
• Taryn Simon : An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Steidl June, 2007 (ISBN 9783865213808)

External links

• Taryn Simon website
• Behind Closed Doors, New York Times Magazine
• Lens Crafters, Time Magazine
• Access All Areas, Frieze
• Freedom Row, New York Times
• Taryn Simon, Interview Magazine
• Taryn Simon's talk at TED 2009
• An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar
• An interview with Taryn Simon on Charlie Rose, March 16, 2007
• An interview with Taryn Simon on Late Night Live, 9 November 2010
• TateShots: Taryn Simon The artist talks about her exhibition 'A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters'. 3 June 2011