Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon’s photos scare the crap out of me. But, at the same time, I find them totally fascinating and engrossing. I guess they fit the description of grotesque in every sense of the word for me. As in:

In particular, I can’t get her photo of an inbred and (literally) retarded white tiger out of my head. It’s like it’s been burned onto my retinas:

He’s so bizarre and menacing yet oddly cute and sad. Like a cross between a very real-looking muppet from Jim Henson and a World Wildlife Fund ad.

But it’s not just the “oh wow!” factor of Simon’s photos that get me. Don’t get me wrong: it’s completely amazing that she can talk her way into the locations she gets access to and there’s definitely something virtuosic about her ability to convince authorities to let her into these places. It’s also just the surreality of the images. They look so real, yet they show things we’ve only imagined or objects that seem totally implausible (a copy of Playboy in braille?) The photograph’s ability to objectively replicate a view of the world has been in crisis for a while now, but Simon’s photos just take it one step further. My initial reaction to these images is that they must be manipulated or staged in some way, but then it also seems completely possible that, if we were just given access to the Customs Contraband Room, we might stumble across exactly what we see in Simon’s photos.

I guess what ultimately creeps me out about her images is the fact that they are, in some way, “real.” That, as I recently heard a panelist argue, the bizarre nature of everyday life can often trump Dadaism.