Contraband By Taryn Simon

For this project, artist Taryn Simon assumes the dual role of shrewd informant and collector of curiosities, compiling an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States. She examines a culture through careful documentation of diverse subjects from the realms of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security, and religion. Transforming the unknown into a seductive and intelligible form, Simon confronts the divide between those with and without the privilege of access.
Simon makes use of the annotated-photograph's capacity to engage and inform the public. Through text and image, the work underscores the complicated relationship between a photograph and its context. The visual is processed aesthetically and then re-defined by its text.
Her sometimes ethereal, sometimes foreboding compositions, shot with a large-format view camera over a four year period, vary as much as her subject matter, which ranges from radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility to a black bear in hibernation.
In examining that which is integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning, Simon creates a collection of works that reflect and reveal a national identity. The publication features 70 colour plates and Salman Rushdie wrote the foreword to accompany the book. Ronald Dworkin contributed a commentary, while curators Elisabeth Sussman and Tina Kukielski of the Whitney Museum of American Art contributed an introduction. It was published by Steidl and exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2006. As of late 2007 it was on view at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany.. She discussed the project with photography historian Geoffrey Batchen for the 8th volume of Museo.