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Taryn Simon and The Archive. - The Open College of the Arts

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Taryn Simon and The Archive.

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date.
 
Taryn Simon is an artist who has interested me over the past few years with her use of photography to question photography.  I find her series The Innocents brilliant in it’s subversion of photography as truth.  The people in the pictures were sentenced to jail for a crime they didn’t commit and Simon photographed them at the scene of the alleged crime.  Throughout history photographs of people have been used as evidence for conviction yet Simon directly challenges photography’s nature as a document.  By taking the accused to the crime scene she fabricates the truth in the same way the justice system was based on fabrications in these instances.  As well as creating an emotional and tense scene which works well as a piece of contemporary art, The Innocents challenges the idea that a photograph can be a piece of evidence.  An issue which comes to high pertinence for all of us when, for example, something like Abu Ghraib happens.  (See her talk about it and other work here on TED.)

Image by Taryn Simon from the series The Innocents.

When I saw she had some work in Gagosian I had to go.  What I was greeted with was a rather underwhelming array of library clippings, categorised and displayed in large frames under headings such as Chiaroscuro, Highway Expresses, Rear Views…  Let’s describe it as cerebral.
Visually speaking I wasn’t riveted.  But there was something (probably my past fascination with her work as well as my own thoughts about public archives; who decides what gets selected for the public domain and what about all that stuff we don’t know about?) that kept me interested. That was the hook, so I stayed in that solitary room, being watched and followed by the doorman, making notes and refused a Press Release until I was satisfied and moved on.

Photograph by Mike Bruce for Gagosian.

Looking back at my notes I thought there are a few things of interest to us as we study photography (as a genre, not as specific images) so I will relay them here.
The New York Public Library has a picture collection which spans the last century.  It contains 1.2 million clippings of postcards, newspapers, magazines, journals, books and has over 12,000 categorisations.
We are told that “Diego Rivera… noted how the scope of this picture collection might go on to shape contemporary visions of America.”  It made me wonder what we believe about America, not only because of this NYPL archive, but because of all the visual pieces that go into our consciousness to make up our minds about America.  And now we have the internet and camera phones and everyone is a curator.
Then it got me thinking about Britain.  What visual information has been selected by someone else to help me make up my mind about where I live?  What about the things that don’t get selected?  My mind goes to dark places.  So I bring it back to something I know more about – my own history.  Surely.
A large part of who I believe I am is as a direct result of visual information passed down through photographs.  I don’t really remember most of those incidents but they remind me that I exist, they confirm my existence to others and they give me a general picture of a happy childhood.
Then it brings me to my own editing of what images will get passed on through me.  In and outside of my control visual images will make up my own and future generations perceptions of themselves and their society.  What will that understanding look like?  And what will we choose to omit from that collective memory?
The Picture Collection is on display at the Gagosian Gallery in London until 28th March.


Posted by author: Sharon

7 thoughts on “Taryn Simon and The Archive.

  • I went to this small exhibition too and found myself spending a great deal of time trying to figure out what criteria Simon used to make her selection. 1.2 million images sounds like a lot but in terms of the internet it is a drop in the ocean. Google and the other search engines do most of the filtering online… it’s worrying to think that large private companies are doing most of the image selection for us ….do we know anything how these selections are made…this, as you say, takes the mind to dark places..lots of food for thought in this Sharon. Thanks for the post. By the way I went to Taryn Simon’s ‘A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters’ exhibition at MOMA in New York last year. This was much much larger and demonstrated why Simon is regarded as the contemporary Queen of Typology. Her attention to detail is jaw dropping. In one of the exhibits she had photographed all living members of a family of Australian rabbits, which included 350 separate rabbit portraits!! I posted my thoughts on the exhibition on my blog here

  • Taryn Simon had an exhibition at The Tate Modern a year or two ago – I did not have time to view it all but do remember an in-depth typology about a Rajasthani family. Another was of objects confiscated by immigration at JFK airport!
    Is this merely obsession? When you get to put it up on a gallery wall or made into a book then apparently not. Interested to hear your thought processes Sharon about this artist whose work I feel drawn to albeit inexplicably. Likewise appreciate your comments Keith – what indeed are the Google filtration settings!?

  • By the way, Innocents portrays people who were convicted for crimes they were innocents of … how do we know that they are innocent?
    Reminds me of a series by David Goldblatt who photographed people at the scenes of the crimes they had convicted.

    • If you watch the excellent TED video which is linked to above Amano, Taryn Simon explains how it is known that they are innocent. It is part of Taryn’s approach to work with the Innocence Project which has an archive of the cases. In the case of Troy Webb, pictured above, the way the police used photography to lead the victim to identify him is stunning.

  • It seems to me that typology and a sort of neo-minimalism is very evident in current and recent exhibitions. This applies across the spectrum of visual mediums but is particularly prevalent in those where the images are derived more or less photographically either by the artist directly or by the artist ‘curating’ third party images form some source or other. Why this might be is the subject of many a potential thesis but is undoubtedly directly linked to the times on which we live and the elements of uncertainty that seem to prevail.
    Those wishing to look into the variety of ideas and theories that inform this trend might like to read the work of Allan Sekula particularly his Essay ‘The Body and the Archive’ in Bolton, R. (ed.)(1992) The contest of meaning: critical histories of photography, Cambridge: MIT Press.; John Tagg’s The Burden of Representation; and watching Stephen Poliakoff’s TV drama Shooting the Past.
    Photographic practice has been pressed into the service of typology, categorisation, taxonomy and the like, for both laudable and suspect motives almost since its invention but it is really only since the middle of the 20thC the artists have taken up the archivists and taxonomists practices as a practice.
    Part of the reason for this is, of course, the assumptions, mostly false, that we make about the probity of the photograph and the way that this can be and has been utilised for ideological reasons on the one hand and can be subverted for artistic purposes.

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