I’ve always been a huge fan of Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar so I was very excited to receive the book of her latest work A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters.
Produced over a four year period, the work maps a series of 18 ancestral bloodlines and investigates the unpredictable events that determine the histories of her subjects’ lives.
The exhibition at Tate Modern (closes 2 January 2012) is breathtaking in its ambition and scale but for me, the real legacy of this project is in this remarkable book. Meticulous and serious, yet extremely engaging, Simon’s work compels the viewer to pay attention to complex layers of information and, combinations of text and image. To be able to do this at leisure and with the work, as it were, in my hands, is a real delight.
www.tarynsimon.com
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I had the pleasure of seeing Taryn speak at the 2009 edition of TEDGlobal in Oxford. Her talk's now on the TED site at http://www.ted.com/talks/taryn_simon_photographs_secret_sites.html
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