TARYN SIMON

THE CONSPIRACY OF WORD AND IMAGE

The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

I’d like to begin here not with ‘An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar’ (2007), but with an earlier series by Taryn Simon, ‘The Innocents’ (2003). It consists of photographic portraits of some thirty-nine men and one woman who had all spent long periods in prison, sometimes even on death row, after being convicted of crimes they did not commit. Simon photographs them now outside of prison after their original convictions had been overturned and they were subsequently released. She had first become aware of many of the cases while shooting photographs to accompany a newspaper story on the Innocence Project, in which lawyers appeal trials in which a manifest injustice appears to have occurred and evidence exists that would challenge the original verdict. In the particular cases Simon depicts, she selects only those in which a conviction was obtained on the basis of photographic evidence: in which the subject was identified from a photograph when they had failed to be picked out in a live line-up, or in which the police had shown the eyewitness an old photograph of the subject that more matched their description. The second notable feature of the series is that, after having first tried a neutral or objective style of portraiture, Simon decided to portray her subjects in a more personally significant context: either where they said they were at the time of the crime, where they were arrested or, on rarer occasions, at the actual scene of the crime with their supposed victim.

Of course, it is tempting at first to read The Innocents in terms of a rather banal self-accusation by photography. What is understood to give the work its specifically artistic... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Live HIV, HIV Research Laboratory
Harvard Medical School
Boston, Massachusetts

This flask contains Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that is infecting human peripheral blood mononuclear cells and replicating. It will be used to study the neutralizing potential of antibodies against HIV, in both individuals infected with the virus and participants in vaccine studies. The HIV Vaccine Trials Network was formed when the federal government reorganized its HIV vaccine research program in 1999. It is a division of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

There are no documented cases of anyone infected with HIV developing sterilizing immunity. More than 42 million people worldwide are infected with HIV. At the current rate of infection, experts predict that 90 million people will be HIV carriers by 2010. A new infection occurs approximately every 10 seconds.

Taryn Simon, Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility Cherenkov Radiation, Hanford Site, U.S. Department of Energy, Southeastern Washington State.

Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility Cherenkov Radiation
Hanford Site, U.S. Department of Energy
Southeastern Washington State

Submerged in a pool of water at Hanford Site are 1,936 stainless-steel nuclear-waste capsules containing cesium and strontium. Combined, they contain over 120 million curies of radioactivity. It is estimated to be the most curies under one roof in the United States. The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov Effect which describes the electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle, giving off energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium. The temperatures of the capsules are as high as 330 degrees Fahrenheit. The pool of water serves as a shield against radiation; a human standing one foot from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of radiation in less than 10 seconds. Hanford is among the most contaminated sites in the United States.