Rear Views, A Star-Forming Nebula, and the Department of Foreign Propoganda

Born in New York in 1975, Taryn Simon is at the forefront of contemporary photography practice. Her artistic medium is based around three equal elements, photography, text and graphic design, which combined investigate the limitations of absolute understanding, examining the gaps between each element and how this can lead to disorientation and ambiguity.
In the last ten years she has created a suite of projects which deal with a number of theoretical and visual concerns. Her formal interest in arrangement and cataloguing has seen her experiment with different methods of presentation and display, particularly in A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2008-11) in which she travelled around the world researching bloodlines: splitting up each work in the final piece into three segments, she presented large portrait sequences of related individuals on the left, a text panel containing details and narratives in the centre, and 'footnote images' on the right of fragmented pieces of established narratives and other photographic evidence.