Taryn Simon and the Machinery Behind the Picture

For one working week, Taryn Simon set up at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and photographed, without a break, whatever the government took away from travellers. Working inside the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the U.S. Postal Service International Mail Facility, she made 1,075 photographs of items detained or seized from passengers and express mail arriving from abroad. The result, Contraband, dated 2010, reads like an inventory, because that is what it is. Each object sits alone, lit and identified, and the cumulative effect is a portrait of a border drawn not on a map but in a list of forbidden things.

That method, a camera pointed at a system rather than at a person or a view, runs through nearly everything Simon has made. She was born in New York in 1975 and still works there. This autumn her largest project to date fills the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Photographs that convicted

Simon’s first major series began with a problem in photography itself. The Innocents documents people who served prison time for violent crimes they did not commit. According to KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, which showed the work from September 27, 2003 to January 3, 2004, the leading cause of those wrongful convictions was mistaken identification, often produced by the way police used photographs and lineups.

Simon photographed each exoneree at a place that mattered to the case: the scene of the misidentification, of the arrest, of the alibi, or of the crime. Those sites carry contradictory meanings for the people standing in them, and the pictures do not resolve the contradiction. They leave the viewer looking at a person in a place, aware that a similar image once helped send that person to prison. The project was made with the support of the Innocence Project and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. The Berlin presentation also included other work: photographs of Chechen rebels made with the photographer Alexei Hay, a slideshow of Fidel Castro, and a portrait of an American death row inmate.

An index of what is kept out of view

Simon’s next project turned from the courtroom to the country. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art from March 9 to June 24, 2007, gathered sites and things inside the United States that are integral to its functioning but closed to the public. The subjects range across science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security and religion. Simon used a large-format view camera whenever conditions allowed, and photographed, among much else, radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility and a black bear in hibernation.

Tate owns several of the images. Its collection includes a white tiger named Kenny, bred through selective inbreeding, at the Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge and Foundation in Eureka Springs, Arkansas; a decomposing corpse at the forensic anthropology research facility of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville; and the buried film set of The Ten Commandments in the Nipomo Sand Dunes at Guadalupe, California. All three date from 2007.

The Whitney described the series as an inquiry into who has access and who does not. Simon herself framed what she found as “the strange magic at the foundation of a national identity.” The titles are part of that magic. Each one reads like a caption, naming the subject, the institution and the town, and in doing so it reminds the viewer how much a photograph depends on someone telling you what it shows.

Bloodlines in eighteen chapters

The text grew larger in A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I to XVIII, which Tate Modern showed from May 25 to November 6, 2011. Over four years Simon travelled to record bloodlines and the stories attached to them. Each of the eighteen chapters has three parts: a portrait panel showing members of a single bloodline, an annotation panel, and a footnote panel of photographic evidence. According to Tate’s press release, the full work contains 817 portraits arranged in panels more than two metres high and between one and seven metres wide.

Among the families she traced are rival clans in Brazil, Bosnians killed in the genocide, a man who served as body double for Uday Hussein, and Indians who are living but recorded by the state as dead. Where a living member of a bloodline could not be photographed, Simon left the space empty and recorded the reason. Those blanks are among the most pointed parts of the work. They show the limits of the system she built, and they make the absence of a person into a fact as visible as any portrait.

The Tate display was curated by Simon Baker with Maeve Polkinhorn, using a set lent by the Wilson Centre for Photography as a promised gift to the museum. Tate’s collection now lists Chapters I to VI among its 31 works by the artist.

The rotunda

The new exhibition at the Guggenheim, Father Country I Do Love You, opened on September 18, 2026 and runs to March 14, 2027. The museum announced it in its 2026 schedule as a new body of work premiering photographs, text, videos and sculptures that had never been shown, assembled into a single interactive installation that takes over the entire rotunda. Visitors choose their own route through it as the narrative spirals up the ramp. The show is organized by Nat Trotman, the museum’s curator of performance and media, and it coincides with the 250th anniversary of the United States.

The timing suits an artist who has spent a career cataloguing the American state from the inside. The airport, the courtroom, the nuclear storage site and the forensic lab all appear in her earlier work as places where institutions decide what counts as evidence. A spiral ramp built by Frank Lloyd Wright is a different kind of institution, but it imposes its own order on looking, and Simon has never been interested in order as something neutral.

What links the projects is less a subject than a procedure. Simon picks a category that already exists, whether wrongful convictions, seized goods, bloodlines or the hidden infrastructure of a nation, and then documents it so completely that the category begins to show its seams. The photographs are precise and often beautiful. The texts beside them are what make the beauty uneasy.