Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar

When Simon’s exhibition toured the US, the New York Times felt bound to comment that: ‘Ms. Simon couches the show in the intellectual, power-to-the-people oratory of leftist politics. Yet she clearly delights in exposing, in a quasi-tabloid fashion, America’s underbelly’, Kierra Box reviews

It is tempting to subscribe to this blithe equation of ‘exposure’ with a pretension of leftism. When we speak of that which is hidden, that we are not allowed to access, it is easy to ascribe the ability to conceal and gatekeep to ‘the [implicitly right-wing] system’. Yet when Simon states that her work ‘very explicitly does not have an agenda’ her images serve to bear her out.

They are deliberately representative of discreet themes – communication, biology, law – with little overlap between the specific moral, intellectual and scientific questions they raise. An image of the emerging transatlantic communications cables (four orange and one yellow, if you’re interested) hangs next to a shot of a decaying corpse in woodland, and across from a Pollock-esque photo of decontaminated medical waste. It’s not so much that the items displayed are unfamiliar, but that the contexts in which Simon finds them are unexpected and strangely jarring.

These are, as Simon stresses, images we simply do not allow ourselves to see or imagine – some because they are uncomfortable, either politically or morally; but many because they are processes we just ignore and submerge in everyday life. Imagine the world as an automated public toilet, and these images as the record of what goes on when the structure is empty. The Photographers Gallery describes them as ‘transforming the unknown into a seductive and intelligible form’.

Simon uses text as few photographers do, as an integral part of her work. This was evident from observing other visitors at the exhibition – moving from image to text and back repeatedly. There are images that do not reveal their meaning until the text is read. There are instances when the text is more bizarrely interesting than the image. Cataloguing the confiscated contents of the US Customs and Border Protection Contraband Room at John F Kennedy Airport, Simon offers us a thorough, and reassuringly apolitical, inventory of the forbidden fruits and meats of the globalised Eden. Without moving in to a discussion of immigration and asylum systems, this list transforms the traditional photographic still life into a reminder of borders and our incessant attempts to control them.

At times her explanatory texts can seem tenuously connected to the images they accompany, with the unfortunate side effect of rather diminishing the seeming ‘reliability’ of the exhibition.

Simon suggested in an interview with The Photographers Gallery that: ‘to succeed in the end, [the images] needed to have both the conceptual and aesthetic alive in the frame’. In this, many of her images succeed – a shot of a marijuana testing centre suffused with a deep, vibrant green light ably highlights the issues surrounding the medical use of classified drugs; and a black frame with neon blue circles provides an approach reminiscent of a Tate Modern installation to the subject of nuclear waste.

Simon’s American Index lacked the emotion of her previous work, The Innocents. By focusing on the inanimate and the aesthetic, she loses the obvious political and moral questions, which were bought up by the subject of the falsely imprisoned. The consequent reliance on text as an aid towards comprehension of the images is somewhat disappointing, but still provokes enough curiosity to somehow justify the £40 price tag on the exhibition catalogue and fill the gallery with visitors. However, the whole thing seemed curiously encapsulated by the first image to greet visitors to the gallery – A Braille copy of Playboy. I couldn’t help wondering what use the textured text would be in the absence of images, and came to the conclusion that, more importantly, such a product must miss the pornographic purpose of the magazine entirely.

In some ways Simon’s work seems to do the same – privileging text at the expense of graphic, and leaving her open to criticism on a textual as well as an artistic level. Where the images work, the interplay with their context is complicated, and this interplay is perhaps not entirely as well though out as we might expect – yet, as with the Playboy, I somehow find this attempt to bring information to the masses to be laudable nonetheless.