Have Lens, Will Travel. To produce the hundreds of portraits in A Dead Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, Simon visited 25 countries in four years. Even a single bloodline might have members scattered across several nations.
If Taryn Simon hadn't become a photographer, she could have made a fortune in sales, because she has persuasive powers that the rest of us can only dream of. For her 2007 exhibition and book An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, she got herself admitted to dozens of places where outsiders with cameras aren't usually allowed, including a nuclear-waste storage facility and a reconstructed crime scene at a forensic research center, complete with a rotting corpse. For another project, Contraband, she persuaded the wary authorities at John F. Kennedy International Airport to let her photograph every item seized by customs over a five-day period, from counterfeit Viagra to cow-dung toothpaste. Despite a personal manner that's the last word in low key, she has a way of getting what she wants. "If somebody closes the door," she says, "I have to find another way to get in."
Simon, 37, had to find a lot of ways in for her new show, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, which is on view through Sept. 3 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City before moving to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The organizing principle for this project is what she calls bloodlines: all the living descendants, plus any living forebears, of a single man or woman who sets a story in motion. Traveling to 25 countries, Simon tracked down hundreds of family members bound together by not just genealogy but often some curious or painful fate. In India she located living people officially declared dead, a predicament involving corrupt bureaucrats scheming to seize their property. In Bosnia she followed the bloodline of young men killed in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Muslims by Bosnian Serbs. In Brazil she inventoried rival clans trapped in a decades-long feud--people condemned by kinship to an endless cycle of bloodshed and revenge. Hauling around a sizable 4-by-5-in. tripod-mounted camera plus lights and neutral backdrops, she photographed any family member who would agree to sit for her.
A project like A Living Man Declared Dead is more labor-intensive than a lunar landing, so it's impressive that Simon accomplished it with just two regular associates, her sister Shannon Simon and assistant Douglas Emery. "I work all the time," Simon says matter-of-factly. (She paused long enough last year to marry filmmaker Jake Paltrow, Gwyneth's brother.) Simon began A Living Man Declared Dead with a marathon of research and investigation. "I'll pick the brains of anyone around me," she says. "I'll get ideas from something I've seen in a film or a scientific journal." International aid groups helped lead her to families she might include. So did the freelance intermediaries whom foreign correspondents--and Simon--like to call fixers: ground-level operators who know the locals.