TARYN' WITH THE NEGATIVE

SIMON, HYPERVISIBILITY AND THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF JUDGEMENT

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When I heard, at first, of the title of Taryn Simon’s exhibition, ‘An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar’, I imagined a display of disturbing, even off-putting photographs à la Diane Arbus that would take the viewer into the dank recesses of the American ‘political unconscious’. There, in Kodak moment after moment, Simon would capture—so I expected—the ‘plague of fantasies’ that Disney Inc. had been so intent upon screening from her lens when they, as the caption to the exhibition’s one empty display attests, denied her access to the ‘magic kingdom’s’ sanctum sanctorum in an official-ese of mind-boggling prose. Perhaps, though, Uncle Walt’s very nervous—and syntactically tortured—executives had some grounds for concern because a few of those Arbus-ian grotesques pop up, rather predictably, here—for example, in the shirtless and tatt’d white supremacists, tricked out in their best Nazi and Neo-Confederate regalia; or, along similar ‘Southern Gothic’ lines, in the snake-handling cleric of the ‘Bible Belt’s’ most bizarre brand of ‘fundamentalist’ (post?-)Christianity. More unusual, however, are the two anti-Zionist rabbis smiling, quizzically, for the camera; or, to give a last example, the wheelchair bound ‘Death with Dignity’ activist, clutching onto (like grim death?) the means of his own destruction: his script for an overdose of Nembutal. What I did not expect, though, was how light and airy, even beautifully (but also rigorously) composed many of these photographs were in what I thought was going to be a journey into some forbidding and forbidden Yank ‘heart of darkness’: a glinting flask filled with a whisky-like liquid, radiating a golden malted glow; a banquet table groaning with heaped ‘goodies’, themselves a riot of colour; even a dazzling desert horizon, burnt by the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Contraband Room
John F. Kennedy International Airport
Queens, New York

African cane rats infested with maggots, African yams (dioscorea), Andean potatoes, Bangladeshi cucurbit plants, bush meat, cherimoya fruit, curry leaves (murraya), dried orange peels, fresh eggs, giant African snail, impala skull cap, jackfruit seeds, June plum, kola nuts, mango, okra, passion fruit, pig nose, pig mouths, pork, raw poultry (chicken), South American pig head, South American tree tomatoes, South Asian lime infected with citrus canker, sugar cane (poaceae), uncooked meats, unidentified sub tropical plant in soil.

All items in the photograph were seized from the baggage of passengers arriving in the U.S. at JFK Terminal 4 from abroad over a 48-hour period. All seized items are identified, dissected, and then either ground up or incinerated. JFK processes more international passengers than any other airport in the United States.

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.