Rules of Engagement: with photographic truthfulness no longer taken on faith, some photographers are working out a new set of protocols for making pictures that are seriously real

Art in America, June-July, 2008 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

Simon courts a particularly ominous mood with topics that involve matters governmental, military, corporate or medical (an avian quarantine facility, a debris field at a treatment center for infectious medical waste, a training center that offers three-day workshops in interrogation resistance), while presenting pictures that are superficially calm, compared to, say, Lewis Baltz's glowering, marrow-chilling pictures of labs and research facilities from 1989 to '91. Oddly, though, Simon's more outre subjects--a woman spread-eagled in a clinic awaiting the surgical reconstruction of her hymen, an inbred and mentally retarded white tiger named Kenny--hark back to the sort of sensationalizing anthology epitomized by the 1962 film Mondo Cane, which flogged everything from the liver-fattening practices of goose farmers to an Yves Klein painting performance with the same breathless tagline: "All The Scenes You Will See In This Film Are True And Taken Only From Life ... If Often They Are Shocking It Is Because There Are Many Astounding, Even Unbelievable Things In This World."

Something of that bombast is furnished by the essayists who weigh in on Simon's behalf. In the foreword, novelist Salman Rushdie declares, "In a historical period in which so many people are making such great efforts to conceal the truth from the mass of people, an artist like Taryn Simon is an invaluable counter-force." He praises Simon for "going to the ambiguous boundaries where dangers--physical, intellectual, even moral--may await." When he writes "I am always immensely grateful to people who do impossible things on my behalf and bring back the picture. It means I don't have to do it," you might be inclined to think that Rushdie read--but missed the sarcasm of--Rosler's summation of documentary photography: "Documentary testifies, finally, to the bravery or (dare we name it?) the manipulativeness and savvy of the photographer, who entered a situation of physical danger, social restrictedness, human decay, or combinations of these and saved us the trouble." (17)

On the whole more measured is the book's principal essay (an excerpt served as the Whitney's introductory wall text), which was authored by curators Sussman and Kuldelski. Yet even their characterization of the project skews toward anxiety and despair. They assert that Simon's pictures show that "the American soft is wrapped up in a political, cultural, and economic quagmire," and that an "unwavering sense of doom is the undercurrent of An American Index." (18) Simon's own brief texts (which are written with researchers and editors) are restrained in comparison. Nevertheless, the facts she deploys are plainly intended to weaponize the pictures. A pewter-toned study of the spherical Dynamo III, which is a Boullee-worthy model of the earth's core at the University of Maryland, goes from mysterious to sinister only once we read that it is filled with a highly flammable liquid, and that scientists use the apparatus to study the catastrophic consequences of the decay of the earth's magnetic field. That hymenoplasty patient is neither a trophy wife nor an aging actress, so we read, but a young woman of Palestinian descent who (in a case of patriarchal oppression?) will be deemed unmarriageable by her family and community unless her "virginity" is restored by Dr. Bernard Stern (a Jewish name?), whose fee (blood money or fair recompense for honor recovered?) is $3,500. So much can be insinuated by a just-the-facts-ma'am approach.