Taryn Simon
Born in 1975 in New York, artist Taryn Simon received a BA in art semiotics from Brown University in 1997, while concurrently taking photography classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her practice incorporates photography, text, and graphic design. Known for applying classification systems to troves of images, Simon produces heavily researched bodies of work that unearth little-known narratives from around the world, while undermining the faith placed in the objectivity of image and archival text. Simon’s art often uncovers the unexpected effects of geopolitical forces and large-scale policies on the lives of individuals as well as the fates of the communities they form. An early series, The Innocents (2003), which stemmed from a 2000 assignment from the New York Times, catalogued the individual histories of people who had been exonerated of crimes through the use of DNA evidence. Fueled by her realization that photography as a medium had often contributed to her subjects’ faulty convictions, whether as a component of police lineups or prosecutors’ cases, Simon documented her subjects at sites significant to their histories, such as the locations of their arrests or of ey…
Films