She looks for meaning in the dark side of life. Nigel Benson meets American photographer Taryn Simon.
It's not easy to get a snapshot of Taryn Simon. The New York photographer is part-artist and part-forensic documenter.
Her latest exhibition, "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar", recently opened at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
The exhibition was inspired by American finger-pointing over alleged secret-weapon sites in Iraq.
"I'd been thinking about all the secret sites hidden all around the world. Then September 11 happened and I decided to do this exhibition after that," she told the Otago Daily Times this week.
"It looks inward - inside American borders - at the same time the American Government and media were looking outside the borders, in places like Iraq, for weapons of mass destruction."
"An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" exposes the United States' hidden underbelly, delving into secret sites of decomposing and cryogenically frozen bodies, radioactive waste and deadly viruses.
"The work is meant to be disorienting. It was produced during a disorienting time in my history as an American," Simon says.
"I felt like I was discovering a new landscape in America - a new terrain - morally and politically."
Simon (34) was born in New York and works on assignment for The New York Times Magazine.
She is best known for her portrait work of subjects such as United States president Barack Obama and Cuban president Fidel Castro and for her photographs documenting international regions in turmoil.
She spent four years compiling "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar".
It premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2006, where it was heralded as "an ethnography of the American psyche rendered through an obsessive documentation of its repressed places".
It took the photographer a year to gain permission for access to some of the high-security zones, which include a nuclear-waste storage facility, death row, a corpse-sprinkled "forensic park", a cryopreservation unit and CIA offices.
"Every image was a problem. All of them had some sort of obstacle. Nothing goes smoothly with restricted areas," she sighs.
"The most challenging one was the nuclear-waste facility. It was a serious challenge to gain access there and then I had to do an extremely long exposure to get that image.
"Radiation is a light source I've never worked with, so there was no visual reference to shoot from. [Then] I found this one section that resembled the US. That was a great find."
The 1936 stainless-steel nuclear-waste capsules in the Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility in Washington emit an eerie blue glow, called the "Cherenkov Effect".
The caesium- and strontium-filled capsules are submerged in a pool of water, which acts as a shield against the radiation.
A person standing less than a metre from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of radiation in less than 10 seconds.
The images in the exhibition are accompanied with text, which says what the photographs can't.
"The photographs are deliberately abstract and the text then re-informs," Simon says. "The approach is informed by the content. I think about the formality, the art and seductive quality and then consider the content to shoot the image.
"Distortion is a constant and our eyes are easily deceived. There are very few things that don't have a visual anchor. But the work intentionally stands outside an editorial position.
"I think America has less restrictions and is more transparent than most other countries."
The images border on the bizarre. Many offer a horrifying insight into the human condition.
A cryopreservation unit in Michigan holds the frozen bodies of Rhea and Elaine Ettinger, the mother and first wife of cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger.
A white tiger called "Kenny" peers forlornly at the camera in Arkansas - a victim of selective inbreeding to artificially create the genetic conditions that lead to white fur, ice-blue eyes and a pink nose.
As a result of inbreeding, Kenny is mentally retarded and has significant physical limitations.
He has difficulty breathing and closing his jaws, his teeth are severely malformed and he limps because his front legs have an abnormal bone structure.
The Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in Tennessee, known as "the Body Farm", is the world's leading research centre for the study of corpse decomposition and hosts more than 70 cadavers in various stages of decay.
Investigators and pathologists use analysis of the skeletal human remains to help solve murder cases.
"They gave me gloves . . . let me roam around and do whatever I wanted to do.
I had a strange reaction to being there with bodies lying all around.
I was thinking a lot about how we handle and interpret and respect our dead."
There is also the innocuous, such as transatlantic submarine telecommunication cables reaching thousands of kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean which transmit up to 60 million simultaneous conversations.
"There's a humour, because the cables are so important, yet they look so unguarded and unimportant," Simon says.
"With all of the photographs I was trying to get at a white noise that was disorienting. There's something apocalyptic and yet something optimistic in it."
Australian Institute of Modern Art director Robert Leonard supervised the hanging of the exhibition in Dunedin and gave the ODT a guided peek preview last month.
"It's quite a significant project. I think it's a very audacious and timely project which exploits the conventions of photography," he said.
"When I first saw it I had a 'Eureka!' moment. The photos are so beautifully and thoughtfully made. There are spectacular images, but there are also apparently banal images that turn out to conceal dark secrets."
• "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar" is on at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery until May 9.
