Taryn Simon

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is a series produced by Taryn Simon which follows the theme of families and loss. She takes pictures of people against the same background, and follows the blood lines. Where somebody cannot be in the picture, for whatever reason including death, then she leaves it blank, and just shows an image of the background while still accompanying it with the title of the name of the person and in this case why they couldn't be there.

In an interview with the Tate she said:

"The works are attempting to map the relationships among chance, blood and other components of fate"

Which to some extent I can relate to with my work, particularly with my revisited idea. All of the people I photograph are connected somehow, such as by blood or by being friends of friends of friends, and the viewer does not know which is which. Because the viewer doesn't know, unlike Simon's work, mine isn't a 'map' as such, but more a jumbled maze.

Her work is shot with a lot of headspace at the top, creating a sense of loneliness and isolation, yet because they're accompanied with their families, it also makes the viewer see each person as an individual rather than a collective group. This is more accurate for her book rather than her exhibitions because in the book she only has four people per page, yet in the exhibition they are more grouped in a grid, making a whole together. I feel that for my own work, displaying my work how she displays her images in the book would work rather nicely. 

Her subjects are usually facing forwards looking blankly into the camera, removing any emotion. the blank background emphasises this while also removing any context and creating a uniformity across the project.

She uses titles to make the audience understand the image better but to also challenge preconceptions; in an interview with AnOther she said:

Absolutely. You come to the image with all these attachments, and preconceived notions and you apply some sort of definition to it. Then you go to the text, which completely shatters everything you were thinking, or redefines it. Then you go back to the image with this new notion of what it is, and have to reinterpret it and retranslate it.

This is very similar to what I was going to use titles for in my original idea. Thinking about Simon's work and how she uses text to challenge these preconceptions makes me wonder if I too should title each image, perhaps they're relation to each other or to me, or whether it would be more effective alone. Her themes of families and relationships are particularly interesting to me, as I am shooting those who are close to me. The theme of family plays along the whole project and shows the importance of family to each other, even those who are not there are important. I think I will experiment more with the theme of those around me.