- Venue
- Photographers Gallery
- Location
Taryn Simon’s exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery is a spatial interpretation of Simon’s catalogue, “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar”. Having spent four years of committed research, Simon has collected the unseen and inaccessible, previously hidden from the public realm. Embracing science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security and religion, Simon has sought out full co-operation and approval from countless American bodies and institutions.
The exhibition itself is strangely alluring, confronting the boundary between inaccessible and accessible knowledge. Photographs of individual, unknown environments are detached from the reality of the everyday and familiar. Simon is a detached collector, informing the viewer of the previously unacknowledged. The unknown at times becomes sinister, the photographic records poised to unsettle and disturb.
Text within this exhibition plays an essential part, without which the photograph remains out of context, without meaning. Blocks of text taken from the catalogue accompany each image, informing the viewer with meticulous precision the use, the institution and the environment, giving where appropriate measurements to fascinating accuracy.
The gallery environment in this case does not lend itself to the fragile relationship between text and image; the continual disruptions of other gallery goers, inhibits the total absorption of information: only within the catalogue does the strange and unknown become still stranger but now acquainted.
Nonetheless, be it within the gallery or the catalogue itself, the index acts as a catalyst, creating a hunger to fill the void of information that has just been tersely created by the truly fascinating body of work.
