Taryn Simon

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII is a major conceptual photographic monograph and archival project examining bloodlines, fate, chance, and the governing structures of human identity.

Over a four-year period (2008-2011), Simon traveled the globe researching and documenting eighteen distinct bloodlines, each shaped by local history, political conflict, governance, or biological determinism.

Every "Chapter" follows a strict, highly controlled visual typology composed of three distinct panels:

• The Portrait Panel: Systematically arranged, front-facing studio portraits of living descendants, ancestors, and relatives within a single lineage. Empty portrait boxes indicate individuals who are deceased, missing, kidnapped, or refused to be photographed.
• The Text Panel: Detail-rich archival narratives outlining the historical, political, or social circumstances governing the family tree.
• The Footnote Panel: Secondary photographic evidence, archival images, artifacts, official documents, and local environments, offering contextual proof of the broader systemic forces impacting the lineage.

Key use cases include:

- Bureaucracy and Erasure: The titular chapter focuses on Shivdutt Yadav and his relatives in Uttar Pradesh, India, who were officially registered as deceased in government land records by corrupt relatives seeking to inherit their property.

- Fate vs. Determinism: Other chapters explore diverse, high-stakes lineages, including the family of a Iraqi body double for Uday Hussein, victims of the Srebrenica massacre, albino individuals targeted in Tanzania, and laboratory rabbits bred for medical testing.

- Taxonomic Rigor: Simon treats human genealogy with the clinical precision of scientific classification, examining how individual lives are governed by structural forces beyond their control.

Produced in conjunction with major solo exhibitions at the Tate Modern, Neue Nationalgalerie, and MoMA, A Living Man Declared Dead is widely recognized as one of the most ambitious conceptual photobooks of the 21st century.

In An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Taryn Simon documents spaces that are integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning, but remain inaccessible or unknown to a public audience. She has photographed rarely seen sites from domains including: science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature security and religion. This index examines subjects that, while provocative or controversial, are currently legal. The work responds to a desire to discover unknown territories, to see everything. Simon makes use of the annotated-photograph's capacity to engage and inform the public. Transforming that which is off-limits or under-the-radar into a visible and intelligible form, she confronts the divide between the privileged access of the few and the limited access of the public. Photographed with a large format view camera (except when prohibited), Simon's 70 color plates form a seductive collection that reflects and reveals a national identity.

Paperwork and the Will of Capital is a conceptual photobook and archival project examining the stagecraft, performativity, and material iconography of global political and economic power.

Simon's investigation began with archival photographs of historical accords, treaties, contracts, and decrees, specifically those signed by the 44 nation-states present at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank and laid the groundwork for modern global capitalism.

Noticing that these high-stakes political ceremonies consistently feature curated floral centerpieces flanking powerful political figures, Simon isolated the arrangements.

Working with a botanist, Simon identified every plant species present in the original archival signing photographs. She then sourced over 4,000 flower specimens directly from the Aalsmeer Flower Auction in the Netherlands, the global epicenter of the commercial floral trade.

Reconstructing the arrangements in her studio, Simon photographed them against color-coded backdrops matching the original ceremony decor. These arrangements function as modern "impossible bouquets"a trope originating in 17th-century Dutch still-life painting where flowers from different seasons and geographies were rendered together in a single painting. Today, such arrangements are made physically possible through global trade routes and industrial agriculture.

By stripping away the politicians, pens, and official documents, Simon isolates the decorative props of diplomacy, showing how political agreements are visually staged, marketed, and performatively validated. The work connects the "will of capital" directly to the control of nature. The global flower trade, where living organisms are grown, shipped, and commodified across continents merely to sit briefly at a signing table, serves as a metaphor for the far-reaching economic policies drafted in those very rooms. nIn addition to large-format photographic still lifes, the broader project includes botanical herbarium specimens, dried, pressed, and sewn onto archival paper, paired with text summaries detailing the real-world political and economic consequences of each signed accord.

Paperwork and the Will of Capital highlights Simon's signature approach: combining rigorous archival research, taxonomic classification, and polished aesthetics to expose hidden systems of authority, bureaucracy, and international governance.

Birds of the West Indies is a two-volume conceptual photographic project inspired by Ian Fleming's James Bond franchise and its namesake source material.

The title derives from the 1936 taxonomy field guide Birds of the West Indies by American ornithologist James Bond, the book from which Ian Fleming famously appropriated the name for his secret agent.

In this project, Simon applies a systematic, archival approach to inventory two distinct elements of the James Bond film series:

• Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies: Simon cataloged every woman, weapon, and vehicle that appeared across the 57-year history of the James Bond film franchise (1962-2015). Functioning as a surreal visual taxonomy, these elements are isolated against neutral backgrounds, transforming cinematic props and tropes into standardized, nature-guide-style specimens.
• Birds of the West Indies: The second volume focuses on the actual birds that appear silently in the background of James Bond film scenes. Simon identified, cropped, and enlarged every avian presence hidden within the movie frames, creating a parallel study of nature amidst artificial cinematic construction.

The project began between 2000 and 2003, when Simon photographed 46 people who had been wrongfully convicted of violent crimes, mostly on the strength of mistaken eyewitness identification, and later exonerated through DNA evidence via the Innocence Project. Rather than shooting straightforward portraits, she staged each photograph at a location tied to the wrongful conviction, the scene of the crime, the site of the misidentification, an alibi location, a choice meant to underscore how photographic evidence itself (mugshots, lineups) had helped put innocent people away.

The work became one of her best-known early series and was the subject of a MoMA exhibition.

This is not the green-cover 2015 second edition.

Founded in 1915, the NYPL Picture Collection contains over one million prints, photographs, postcards, clippings, and illustrations classified into thousands of subject folders. Long before digital search algorithms existed, this physical archive served as a vital, open-access visual engine for researchers, artists (such as Diego Rivera, Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol), designers, and the general public.

Simon explores the collection as an analog precursor to search engines, pointing to the subjective human choices, taxonomies, and invisible systems of power behind how visual information is organized, consumed, and remembered. The book’s title refers to an unusual, hyper-specific patron reference request submitted to the library in 1930.  

The 460-page volume is divided into four major sections:  

1. Essays: Critical text by curator Joshua Chuang and art writer Tim Griffin examining the history of the NYPL Picture Collection, its visionary superintendent Romana Javitz, and Simon’s artistic interrogation of archival structures.  

2. Artworks (The Composites): Includes 57 hand-tipped plates depicting Simon’s large-format studio compositions. Simon pulled contents from specific folder categories, such as Financial Panics, Chiaroscuro, Express Highways, Police, and Handshaking,and layered them into overlapping visual tableaux that reveal accidental juxtapositions and changing social mores.  

3. Archival Documents & Correspondence: A substantial section documenting letters, patron loan requests, memos, and accession records. This correspondence highlights famous artistic interactions (such as Andy Warhol borrowing and famously failing to return items) alongside the everyday demands placed on the collection.  

4. The Photography Collection Transmutation: Highlights rare photographic prints by masters like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Lewis Hine, and Berenice Abbott that were originally submitted to the open-circulation Picture Collection before being recognized for their fine art value and transferred into the NYPL’s permanent Photography Collection.  

Designed by Joseph Logan and Taryn Simon, the book functions as an archive-in-itself, incorporating multiple paper stocks, gatefolds, tipped-in plates, and structural design elements that reflect the physical nature of paper-based archives.  

As a conceptual interrogation of visual archiving, this book is central to the Bushwick Sur Seine Collection, focused on the printed matter, which is itself an archive. Rather than simply being a book of photographs, it is a project about how images are classified, stored, and retrieved. In an era dominated by digital search algorithms, Simon’s work examines the analog systems, specifically the NYPL’s physical card/folder taxonomy, that shaped how generations of artists, researchers, and the public processed visual culture. For a private archive or structured collection, it offers a meta-commentary on the nature of collecting itself.

The book also highlights "The Photography Collection Transmutation," tracing how vintage prints by pivotal modernists, including Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Lewis Hine, were originally housed in open-circulation folders as simple reference material before being recognized for their fine art value and transferred into the library's permanent fine art photography collection. It documents the historical shift in how mid-century documentary photography transitioned from utilitarian print matter into fine art.

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The project began between 2000 and 2003, when Simon photographed 46 people who had been wrongfully convicted of violent crimes, mostly on the strength of mistaken eyewitness identification, and later exonerated through DNA evidence via the Innocence Project. Rather than shooting straightforward portraits, she staged each photograph at a location tied to the wrongful conviction, the scene of the crime, the site of the misidentification, an alibi location, a choice meant to underscore how photographic evidence itself (mugshots, lineups) had helped put innocent people away.

The work became one of her best-known early series and was the subject of a MoMA exhibition.

Taryn Simon published in 2007 the result of four years' work with her new series 'An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar', which has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum in New York, The Photographers' Gallery in London, and at the MMK in Frankfurt.

Documenting an unpredictable range of sites and institutions that are not commonly accessible, Simon reveals issues and power structures at the heart of the American mythology in her carefully staged and visually stunning photographs. Touching upon subjects within the realms of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security, and religion, she offers a surprising and often surreal if not downright disturbing view of the underside of Western civilization. 'An American Index' ranks easily among the most exciting artworks of the decade. With mono.kultur, Taryn Simon talked about the long and strenuous process behind 'An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar', her ambivalent notion of photography and why she then felt less secure in the USA than ever before.