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

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Published to coincide with the photographs' debut at New York's Whitney Museum, Simon's book features 57 primary pictures, seven of which face a second, supplemental image of the subject, and one of which consists of a grid comprising six individual portraits. All the plates are horizontal, and each appears above a descriptive title and a more or less fact-filled explanatory text of some 250 words or more. From the sober gray covers to its allotment of just 5 1/4 by 7~A inches (of a 13 1/4-by-10-inch page) to each color plate, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar has been designed to resemble a dossier or ledger.

Curators Elisabeth Sussman and Tina Kukieiski worked with Simon to select the 17 pictures that were exhibited as chromogenic color prints (each 37 1/4 by 44 1/2 inches). The more generons size, rich colors and museum context inevitably spoke of art-objecthood and collecting, but each print was paired with its respective text to maintain its status as an "annotated photograph," a format intended as a corrective to the medium's susceptibility to estheticization, a problem articulated in the 1970s, as the curators note, by Sekula and Rosier. Further underscoring the marriage of text and image, Simon's book rested on a lectern positioned just outside the entrance to the Whitney gallery.

Simon's compositions are relatively quiet, even repetitive in structure (they tend to be straight-on or to resolve along a stable diagonal), and they come across as considered but not staged. The theatrical lighting-here murky or selective, there fluorescent and deadening--induces an uneasy anticipation. She can make a windowed jury simulation room look as scary as one of Devlin's gas chambers. In one confessional instance, where--to be honest--very little is at stake, Simon goes out of her way to expose the infiltration of her own enterprise by trickery: her close-up of the fearsome-looking Death Star II model used in the Star Wars film series faces a picture of the banal fluorescent-lit, plywood-floored storage room in which the model languishes along with other props and costumes in the Lucasfilm archive.

If An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar critiques the credulity implicit in mid-20th-century street photography, it also breathes new life into an older photographic tradition, that of bringing the marveling viewer face-to-face with all that is remote, rare and often shudder inducing. Many of the images--a hibernating bear and her cubs in a West Virginia national forest, a Lakota ritual performed in Texas--appeal to the same appetite that once sustained a vast subscriber base for Life magazine and National Geographic. Sometimes Simon serves up haute trivia or Hollywoodiana, and sometimes things are not so much hidden as stored, like the Nixon "gifts" warehoused at the National Archives and the freshly inked currency at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. On occasion the "hidden and unfamiliar" simply presupposes an urban and even Northeastern audience, one that doesn't know much about clear burning, cloud seeding, avalanche control or charismatic preachers who handle snakes.