Taryn Simon

I've admired Taryn Simon's work for a while now, and this video beautifully sums up her approach to photography.

From The New York Times :

During the past 50 years, American photographers have sought to reveal America to us mostly by showing, in pictures snapped casually, or better, “casually,” the weirdness hidden in plain sight — on our sidewalks, along our roadsides and in our public rituals and spectacles. (Think of Robert Frank’s touchstone volume, “The Americans.”)

Taryn Simon is of a younger generation (she is 31), and what she is after, in a remarkable new body of work she calls “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” is something altogether different: a sense of what we won’t allow one another to see. In the realms of government, science, security and nature, among others, Simon has gained access where few others have. Yet the resulting photographs carry no sense of struggle or shadowy danger. Like her pictures of tsunami victims and of men who were wrongfully convicted of violent crimes, which have appeared previously in our pages, these “Index” works are formal, carefully lighted, quiet, still: they’re portraits, not snapshots. (This March, these images will be collected in a book published by Steidl and also exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art.) What’s most strongly conveyed, perhaps, by a close study of these photographs, is how intricate and often systematic this off-limits land of ours is — how conscientious we can be about what we don’t want to be conscious of.

(thanks valentine)