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

22.5 × 14.5 cm. Offset print on uncoated card stock. TARYN SIMON / Folder: Costume – Veil, The Picture Collection 2012 in small serif type at lower left of verso. Very good vintage condition with light handling wear, faint corner softening, and minor surface marks consistent with age and storage.

Original oversized artist postcard reproducing Folder: Costume – Veil from Taryn Simon’s series The Picture Collection, 2012. The work draws from the vast image archive of The New York Public Library, where photographs are organised into thematic folders for public reference. Simon re-photographed these folders intact, revealing systems of classification that shape how images, identities, and visual knowledge circulate.

Rather than isolating a single photograph, the postcard reproduces an entire taxonomy. Portraits, magazine clippings, historical reproductions, and anonymous images remain grouped together under the heading Costume – Veil, preserving the archive’s own logic. Three horizontal rows of vertically oriented image fragments — faces, figures, and details cropped from fashion and documentary sources — are arranged across a pale ground, each strip a sliver of a larger image held in the folder.

The printed card functions less as documentation than as a portable fragment of that classificatory system. A quietly compelling piece of museum ephemera from one of Simon’s most influential bodies of work, reflecting her longstanding interest in archives, institutional structures, and the organisation of information.

Shipping and handling included in the listed price.