Taryn Simon
The Photographers' Gallery, London, UK
Taryn Simon’s work is fuelled by paradoxes. In her large-format photographs and in the lengthy captions that accompany them, she persistently trips up the viewer’s reading of her eclectic subject matter. In her current show at The Photographers’ Gallery Simon gathers 32 works under the title ‘An American Index of the Hidden and the Unfamiliar’. A shot of the Alhurra television studio in Virginia is accompanied by a text that explains that this US-funded station broadcasts news around the Arab world, but is prohibited by an act of congress from broadcasting domestically. ‘Alhurra’, Simon wryly notes, is Arabic for ‘the free one’.
While engaged in the business of exposure and dispersion, it is ironic that the places she chooses to depict are often sites of restriction. In many cases she leads us up to and across boundaries, both physical and ideological; photographs of quarantined birds and seized contraband at JFK airport reveal the stony faces of border maintenance, while photographs taken in prisons, military facilities and religious institutions open doors for us that would ordinarily remain closed. She is no impassive documentarist however; her captions direct our understanding of her subjects just as much as her careful lighting and composition. The tension between artifice and veracity frequently becomes the subject itself. Even in her depictions of the natural world, she presents situations that are in fact wholly constructed: a great white shark in a giant cage, or a white tiger, grotesquely deformed by a selective inbreeding programme. The political force to Simon’s work nevertheless rests on the sensation that to some extent we are vicariously witnessing the ‘real thing’ – that these things, though improbable, really do exist.
The ease with which the viewer can move from photograph to photograph however is in stark contrast to the remote and often threatening natures of her subjects. Whether intentionally or not, Simon’s work makes the warmth and safety of the gallery space almost uncomfortable, as she places us within vicarious smelling distance of a decomposing corpse, or hovering over a landscape of fetid waste at the ‘Infectious Medical Waste Treatment Center’. If these images come close to pornography – and in their seductive but fleeting allure they frequently do – it is as an integral part of Simon’s exploration of the privilege of access, the politics of looking and the history of photography. A photograph of a Braille edition of Playboy (an off-key gag deflated at the last minute by a caption listing the eminent writers who have written for the magazine) acknowledges just this complexity.
Jonathan Griffin
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