Taryn Simon was for me the outstanding finalist among those shortlisted for the 2009 Deutsche Börse prize at the Photographers’ Gallery, for her work An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar which gained the 2008 Infinity Award for publishing from the ICP, and was one of the best shows to grace the Photographers Gallery in recent years. But of course the judges though otherwise.
However TED shares my opinion. On their web site they say “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader.” And of course quite a lot more. Put simply, TED gets the best ideas over a very wide range of fields from around the world and presents them. It’s a great honour to be invited to take part.
The best of the 18 minute presentations by those invited to speak are made freely available on their web site – under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. Taryn Simon‘s is one of these, and you can watch her on the TED site as she talks about two of her projects. One is on the hidden sites, a number of which were in the Photographers’ Gallery show, and she adds some interesting comments on how she did the work and why. (You can see some with the accompanying texts from the link near the bottom of her web site page.)
Her earlier project, ‘The Innocents‘ (2003), has a particular photographic interest as she has photographed men wrongly committed to long jail sentences for crimes they did not commit on the basis of photographic evidence. She talks about how showing photographs to crime witnesses can produce unreliable results; often people remember photographs they have seen before and identify these rather than actually remembering the criminal and finding them in the pictures, and gives at least one case where police deliberately mislead a witness. The men were all cleared when further evidence – often DNA – became available and Simon has photographed them in locations with a particular significance to them – their alibi locations (some were convicted despite having many witnesses to testify they were elsewhere) , place of arrest or the scene of the alleged crime.
Simon’s portraits (and the hidden places) are interesting even if you do not know the story behind them, but the stories provide an added dimension which both anchors and intensifies their meaning. They give us some ideas about what we mean by truth in photographs, showing how misleading photographic evidence can be – and what a critical effect this can have on some lives. There are five images from this series on the Gagosian gallery site, and five with an essay and questions at MoCP.