Taryn Simon, Photographers’ Gallery
An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar
13 September - 11 November 2007
Taryn Simon’s exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery is a spatial interpretation of Simon’s catalogue, “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar”. Having spent four years of committed research, Simon has collected the unseen and inaccessible, previously hidden from the public realm. Embracing science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security and religion, Simon has sought out full co-operation and approval from countless American bodies and institutions.
The exhibition itself is strangely alluring, confronting the boundary between inaccessible and accessible knowledge. Photographs of individual, unknown environments are detached from the reality of the everyday and familiar. Simon is a detached collector, informing the viewer of the previously unacknowledged. The unknown at times becomes sinister, the photographic records poised to unsettle and disturb.
Text within this exhibition plays an essential part, without which the photograph remains out of context, without meaning. Blocks of text taken from the catalogue accompany each image, informing the viewer with meticulous precision the use, the institution and the environment, giving where appropriate measurements to fascinating accuracy.
The gallery environment in this case does not lend itself to the fragile relationship between text and image; the continual disruptions of other gallery goers, inhibits the total absorption of information: only within the catalogue does the strange and unknown become still stranger but now acquainted.
Nonetheless, be it within the gallery or the catalogue itself, the index acts as a catalyst, creating a hunger to fill the void of information that has just been tersely created by the truly fascinating body of work.
White Tiger (Kenny), Selective Inbreeding, Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge and Foundation, Eureka Springs, Arkansas
In the United States, all living white tigers are the result of selective inbreeding to artificially create the genetic conditions that lead to white fur, ice-blue eyes and a pink nose. Kenny was born to a breeder in Bentonville, Arkansas on February 3, 1999. As a result of inbreeding, Kenny is mentally retarded and has significant physical limitations. Due to his deep-set nose, he has difficulty breathing and closing his jaw, his teeth are severely malformed and he limps from abnormal bone structure in his forearms. The three other tigers in Kenny’s litter are not considered to be quality white tigers as they are yellow-coated, cross-eyed, and knock-kneed.
© 2007 Taryn Simon / Courtesy Steidl / Gagosian
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