The Jeu de Paume in Paris presents the first anthological exhibition in France of American photographer Taryn Simon’s work.
She uses both pictures and text to try to reach a deeper meaning of photography. Simon presents a series of reflections about the role of images in our society – power, control, the separation between institutions and the public are just some of the topics she explores.
In her first work, ‘The Innocents’ in 2003, she took a series of portraits of people wrongfully convicted, imprisoned and subsequently freed from death row. In their cases photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals by erroneous eyewitness identification.
Taryn Simon is warning us: photography is ambivalent and therefore less faithful to reality than we think. But at the same time images have power, more power than words:
“I think I use photography and text to highlight the ever-changing space where knowledge is created. So I try
