Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon (born New York, 1975) is an artist whose practice moves across photography, text, and installation to examine the systems through which images, information, and identity are organised, classified, and withheld. Her work consistently engages institutional structures — archives, legal systems, government databases, border controls — as both subject and method, producing bodies of work that are as much about the conditions of knowledge as about any single image.

The Picture Collection (2012) draws from the vast image archive of The New York Public Library, where photographs have been organised into thematic folders for public reference since the early twentieth century. Simon re-photographed these folders intact, preserving the archive’s own classificatory logic rather than isolating individual images. The result is a portrait of how visual knowledge is structured: how images of veils, costumes, bodies, and identities are grouped, labelled, and made available for circulation.

The materials gathered here are printed documents of that practice — artist postcards, ephemera, and publications that carry Simon’s images and arguments into a different register of encounter.

  • Taryn Simon, Folder: Costume – Veil, The Picture Collection, 2012, artist postcard, front, pale cream uncoated card with three horizontal rows of small vertically oriented colour and black-and-white image fragments arranged across the centre: each strip shows a cropped detail from a portrait, fashion photograph, or documentary image — faces, hats, veils, figures, and costume details — sourced from the New York Public Library's Costume – Veil folder, the strips varying in width and height, set against the pl Taryn Simon, Folder: Costume – Veil, The Picture Collection, 2012, artist postcard, reverse, plain pale cream uncoated card with no printing except TARYN SIMON / Folder: Costume – Veil, The Picture Collection 2012 in small serif type at lower left.

    Taryn Simon — Folder: Costume – Veil, The Picture Collection, 2012

    Taryn Simon — Folder: Costume – Veil, The Picture Collection, 2012