Family of Man

Abstract

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII By Taryn Simon Museum of Modern Art New York City May 2-September 3, 2012 A century after August Sander began his lifelong series of environmental portraits, People of the 201h Century, the nature of documentary fine art photography has evolved into a multifaceted, contextualized genre no longer reliant on traditional photography's unique moment in time. Taryn Simon's project A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XIII, recently on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, exemplifies this contemporary approach. Simon's project consists of eighteen chapters (nine of which were on display at MoMA), each focusing on a group of people or animals that are usually connected genetically. Simon spent nearly four years, from 2008 to 2011, traveling throughout the world and photographing these genealogies and interconnected groups, including orphans in the Ukraine, invasive rabbits in Australia, a representative multigenerational family selected by the Chinese government, the descendants of a Nazi administrator, a Kenyan polygamist and practicing medical doctor and his offspring, as well as the families of a living man declared dead by land thieves in India, and the first female hijacker. Simon divides each group into three separately framed components: a grid of individual studio portraits shot against a neutral light brown background; a text panel consisting of brief descriptors for each of the portraits and a summary of the group; and lastly, a panel of ancillary photographs (mainly still lifes and landscapes), which Simon captured while on location making the portraits, and which provide context for the underlying genealogical portrait. In Simon's presentation at MoMA the portraits were small, only about 3 x 5 inches, thereby reducing the importance of any particular individual in favor of the larger whole and contributing to the significance of the accompanying text. The size of the photographs and their sheer quantity encourage the viewer to consider the more apparent connections across the large number of portraits: age, race, hair color, and even absence (Simon chose to leave a blank space for those who declined to or could not be photographed). Simon astutely frames her text to present it as its own panel, centered between the grid of portraits and her more limited selection of ancillary photographs, elevating its importance in the grouping and ensuring that her work is not just about looking. We are forced to read in order to understand the relationships across a group, the history of its interconnectedness, and the contemporary legacy Simon is presenting. In her seminal 1981 essay In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography), feminist artist and writer Martha Rosier asked, How useful are documentary photographs if there is no follow no way of knowing what happened next in the story? (1) In A Living Man Declared Dead, Simon answers this question in two ways: first, in many of her genealogical portraits she is revisiting a public figure of some kind (most of her subjects have been previously portrayed in the news media), essentially following up, in Rosler's words, through the lens of each figure's offspring. Second, she expands upon the individual portraits with the text component and also with the inclusion of more subjective images such as landscapes and still lifes. Often, these latter images include interior or exterior spaces related to the subject, or objects that reinforce the narrative contained in the text. For example, in her series of images about female hijacker Leila K haled, Simon includes a photograph of a fragment of the plane that she hijacked, an image of a painting of Khaled by a Palestinian artist, and an aerial photograph of the city of Hail, which Khaled allegedly Forced the pilot to circle during the hijacking. …