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.
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Simon depicts bloodlines as flowcharts of small portraits--like a living periodic table of the elements. What resonates is the persistence, and finally the insufficiency, of ancestry and kinship as systems for making sense of unruly destinies. To show that blood lineage can be an extremely loopy line, she sought out unlikely subjects; one is a Lebanese man who claims to be reincarnated, so he pops up more than once in his family history. "I was always looking for a surreal twist," she says, "something that would lead to a collapse of logic."
All the same, even the most outlandish chapters have their universal element. As Simon puts it, "We're all the living dead, pieces of what came before." What she means is that we all carry the DNA of our forebears; their ghostly current pulses through us. The intricate machinery of her project is designed to show that blood ties are a weak line of defense against the blows administered by history, politics or sheer unlucky circumstance. And in some cases, as with those feuding Brazilians or the Bosnians slaughtered for their ethnic identity, kinship may just be a burden no sane person would want to bear. In some of Simon's portraits, the subjects--links in an endless chain of breeding stock--stare out at us from their perches on the family tree with an expression that seems to say, Get me out of here. Especially the rabbits.
But at least the rabbits didn't squabble among themselves, which is more than you can say for many of the humans Simon had to contend with. "You're always dealing with family members who aren't speaking to other members--all these dramas," she says.
I tell her that I sympathize, because I could never get my entire family to sit for her camera.
Without missing a beat, she responds, "I bet I could."
I bet she could too.
TO SEE MORE OF SIMON'S PHOTOGRAPHS, GO TO time.com/tarynsimon