Synopses & Reviews
A significant and extensive book on a major new body of work by the American artist Taryn Simon. Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I-XVIII was produced over a four-year period (2008-2011), during which Simon travelled the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen "chapters" that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. Her subjects feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. This volume accompanies the exhibitions at Tate Modern, London (May 2011), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (September 2011), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (May-September 2012).
About the Author
Taryn Simon (born 1975) is an American photographer. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. She was born in New York. Her photography and writing have been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts including the
New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, CNN, BBC, Frontline, and
NPR. Simon has been a visiting artist at institutions including Yale University, Bard College, Columbia University, School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design.
Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of the History of Photography and Contemporary Art at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of Burning with Desire: The Conceptions of Photography (1999) and Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2002).
Homi Bhabha is a leading voice in postcolonial studies. He is currently Professor of English and Afro-American Studies, Harvard University.