Taryn Simon

Listed online with ISBN 978-1907946059/1907946055. Not the 2012 Rizzoli re-edition.

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.

In 1936 an American ornithologist named James Bond published the definitive taxonomy Birds of the West Indies. Ian Fleming, an active bird-watcher living in Jamaica, appropriated the name for his novel’s lead character. He found it "flat and colourless," a fitting choice for a character intended to be "anonymous ... a blunt instrument in the hands of the government." In Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies, Taryn Simon casts herself as James Bond (1900–89) the ornithologist, and identifies, photographs and classifies all the birds that appear within the 24 films of the James Bond franchise. The appearance of many of the birds was unplanned and virtually undetected, operating as background noise for whatever set they happened to fly into. Simon’s ornithological discoveries occupy a liminal space―confined within the fiction of the James Bond universe and yet wholly separate from it. This taxonomy of 331 birds is a precise consideration of a new nature found in an alternate reality.

This is not the green-cover 2015 second edition.

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.