From Our Archives: Taryn Simon
Frederick Daye
Alibi location,
American Legion Post 310
San Diego, California,
where 13 witnesses placed Daye at the time of the crime
Served 10 years
of a Life sentence for Rape, Kidnapping and Vehicle Theft
© Taryn Simon, The Innocents, 2002
This article first appeared in our 18th Issue, Humanity
Taryn Simon is a multidisciplinary artist with significant works in mediums as disparate as photography, sculpture, performance, and sound. Her work is research-based and often includes historical objects and documents, thus functioning as both art and archive. Many of her photographic projects have confronted distortions in truth, meaning, and memory that stem from numerous sources: translations between language and vision, sovereign oversight and manipulation, and modes of organization and representation. Her most recent installation at the Park Avenue Armory, a multi-disciplinary performance piece, explores the interstices between dichotomous entities, and specifically how grief mediates human systems of life and death. Her work is conceptual, broad, and exceptionally human. In her earliest series The Innocents (2002) Taryn Simon’s photographs are portraits of exonerees, individuals just released from prison after years of wrongful conviction. The settings of these portraits are always significant to the case of “the innocents” depicted, such as the locus of their misidentification, the scene of the crime, or the place of their arrest. In this way, Simon’s photographs enact the beginning of a fictional narrative surrounding the convicts’ supposed actions, a fiction that altered each of their realities indelibly.
Charles Irvin Fain
Scene of the crime,
the Snake River, Melba, Idaho
Served 18 years of a
Death sentence for Murder, Rape and Kidnapping
© Taryn Simon, The Innocents, 2002
The Innocents divulges yet another example of the misleading nature of the photograph, its capacity to hide distortion behind a guise of realism and veracity. Eyewitness misidentification is the primary cause of wrongful conviction, and this misidentification is furthered by the use of photographs, mug- shots, and lineups in the investigatory process because these images have the capacity to alter the visual memory of the eyewitness or victim. Using the medium of photography itself, Taryn Simon exposes the hand that photography has had in the wrongful conviction of innocent individuals and in the confusion between representation and reality that photographs induce in general.
To read more from this article, check out Issue 18: Humanity
Larry Mayes
Scene of arrest,
The Royal Inn, Gary, Indiana
Police found Mayes hiding beneath a mattress in this room
Served 18.5 years of an 80-year sentence for Rape, Robbery and Unlawful Deviate Conduct
© Taryn Simon, The Innocents, 2002
