Taryn Simon’s photographs of hidden sites

Media release
13 December 2010

Beautiful and banal – Taryn Simon’s photographs of hidden sites

A small flask containing live HIV, an edition of Playboy published in braille by the US Library of Congress, stacks of freshly painted uncut $100 notes inside the US Treasury, sexual assault kits awaiting analysis, a nuclear submarine’s missile control console …these are some of the subjects that captured American photographer Taryn Simon.

The Govett Brewster’s latest exhibition Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar is a fascinating and extensive collection of photographs revealing hidden sites that exist in locations throughout the United States.

Researched and produced over four years, Simon assumed the position of contemporary undercover detective as she collected unlikely images through the lens of a large-format view camera.

Simon spent months negotiating access to sites and then negotiated time constraints and bureaucracy to achieve her absorbing photographic images.

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery director Rhana Devenport said that although the American context is the model, the questions Simon poses can be transferred to contexts throughout the world. The artist raises important lines of thinking about visible and invisible systems of control that address public and private life, she said.

The New York artist’s exhibition is touring internationally and the Govett-Brewster is its only North Island venue. A beautifully illustrated catalogue with a foreword by Salman Rushdie accompanies the exhibition.

It runs from December 18, 2010 to February 6, 2011.

ENDS

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