Taryn Simon?s 'The Color of a Flea?s Eye' presents a history of the New York Public Library?s Picture Collection?a legendary trove of more than one million prints, photographs, postcards, posters and images from disused books and periodicals. Since its inception in 1915, the Picture Collection has been a vital resource for writers, historians, artists, filmmakers, fashion designers and advertising agencies.0In her work 'The Picture Collection' (2012-20), Simon (born 1975) highlighted the impulse to organize visual information, and pointed to the invisible hands behind seemingly neutral systems of image gathering. Each of Simon?s photographs is made up of an array of images selected from a given subject folder, such as Chiaroscuro, Handshaking, Haircombing, Express Highways, Financial Panics, Israel, and Beards and Mustaches. In artfully overlapped compositions, only slices of the individual images are visible, each fragment suggesting its whole. Simon sees this extensive archive of images as the precursor to internet search engines. Such an unlikely futurity in the past is at the core of the Picture Collection. The digital is foreshadowed in the analogue, at the same time that history?its classifications, its contents?seems the stuff of projection.

A fascinating glimpse into the New York Public Library's historic image archive

Catalog of 1,075 photographs, taken by American photographer Taryn Simon, of detained or seized items from passengers and express mail entering the United States from abroad, taken at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the U.S. Postal Service International Mail Facility at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York.

In each of the eighteen 'chapters' that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is divided into eighteen chapters. Each chapter is comprised of three segments: an annotation, a large portrait series depicting bloodline members and a second series containing photographic evidence. 817 portraits are systematically arranged within their chapters. Simon includes empty portraits, representing living members of a bloodline who could not be photographed. The reasons for these absences are provided in the captions and include imprisonment, military service, dengue fever and women not granted permission to be photographed. Simon's presentation explores the struggle to determine codes and patterns embedded in the narratives she documents. These narratives are recognisable as variants (versions, renderings, adaptations) of historical or future episodes. In contrast to the systematic ordering of a bloodline, the seductive elements of these stories - violence, resilience, corruption and survival - disorient the work's highly structured appearance. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, will accompany an exhibition of the same name at Tate Modern, London; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Like the exhibition, the book will also be broken into eighteen chapters. Each chapter will house photographs of the work and extended captions and texts by Simon. Critical essays within the tome are by Geoffrey Batchen and Homi Bhabha.

The most dangerous commodity of all... Joe "Skid" Marak, aka the pilot, is a compulsive smuggler. For him, borders are an outrage to freedom. He lives with his pet rat in the abandoned spire of Manhattan's TransCom Building. His friends are outcasts in a world ripped by plague and repression. The pilot knows his days are numbered. On his ECM-pak, he watches helplessly as his freetrading comrades vanish from the screen: victims of a mysterious force known only as "Bokon Taylay." The brother of his Rollerblading, go-go-dancing girlfriend is Taylay's latest victim. All that is left behind is a smuggled message telling the pilot he must locate the one man who can break Taylay's code, the legendary author of the Smuggler's Bible--a man who may not even exist. It's a risk worth taking. Because to the pilot, there's only one contraband more valuable than life--freedom.

"Photographer Taryn Simon brings us face-to-face with individuals falsely accused and convicted. While mugshots and photo arrays are used to condemn and imprison these innocents, Simon has turned the camera around to document these victims of mistaken identity and perverted justice. Through Simon's interviews with each, the men and women in this book confront the paradox of innocence and imprisonment, the inability to recover the years stolen from them, and the states' unconscionable refusal to compensate them or ease their traumatic transition to civilian life."--BOOK JACKET.

Was wir wahrnehmen, nehmen wir auch für wahr. Keinem Organ wird hierbei mehr Evidenz zugesprochen als dem Auge. Dabei ist das Sehen keineswegs unvoreingenommen. Perspektive, Wissen und Intuition prägen die Visualität. Was Realität ist und was Einbildung lässt sich hier kaum noch auseinanderhalten. Eindrücklicher Beleg hierfür ist Taryn Simons neue Fotoserie The Innocents. Zu sehen sind Menschen an unterschiedlichen Orten, die eint, irrtümlich anhand von Zeugenaussagen und Fotografien für Gewaltverbrechen verurteilt und inhaftiert worden zu sein. Wenn sie für die Aufnahmen nun an die Orte ihrer Verhaftung, des Verbrechens, der falschen Bezichtigung oder ihres Alibis zurückkehren, dann werden sie selbst Zeugen. An Kreuzungen, an denen Realität zu Fiktion und Einbildung zu Wahrheit erklärt wurde, blicken sie fragend in die Weite oder in die Kamera, um der lebende Beweis für die vermeintliche Objektivität und die Ambivalenz der Sinne zu sein.

Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places is indisputably a canonic body of work--a touchstone for those interested in photography and the American landscape. Remarkably, despite having been the focus of numerous shows and books, including the eponymous 1982 Aperture classic (expanded and reissued several times), this series of photographs has yet to be explored in its entirety. Over the past five years, Shore has scanned hundreds of negatives shot between 1973 and 1981. In this volume, Aperture has invited an international group of fifteen photographers, curators, authors, and cultural figures to select ten images apiece from this rarely seen cache of images. Each portfolio offers an idiosyncratic and revealing commentary on why this body of work continues to astound; how it has impacted the work of new generations of photography and the medium at large; and proposes new insight on Shore's unique vision of America as transmuted in this totemic series. Texts and image selections by Wes Anderson, Quentin Bajac, David Campany, Paul Graham, Guido Guidi, Takashi Homma, An-My Leê, Michael Lesy, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Francine Prose, Ed Ruscha, Britt Salvesen, Taryn Simon, Thomas Struth, and Lynne Tillman

This book is the only complete identification guide to West Indian birds from Grand Bahama Island in the North to Granada in the South - a tropical north avifaunal region which includes such species as the tiny Bee Hummingbird (only 2 1/2 inches long), parrots, honey-creepers and toadies. For every species (except vagrants, rare winter visitors or transients, listed on pp. 240-3) there are notes on diagnostic characters, local names, voice, habitat, nidification and range. Eighty are illustrated by Don Eckelberry, 56 by Arthur Singer and 186 Black and White by Earl Poole. This book was enlarged to include Arthur Signer's extra plates and the text has been revised again for this edition. This illustrated guide will be a great boon to professional and amateur even traveler with the most casual interest in birds. Mr. Bond's volume is intended for quick reference and is planned to enable the birds of the West Indian islands to be identified with the minimum of trouble and minimum of description. For purposes of identification the plates in this volume could not be bettered.