Taryn Simon - A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters

I saw this work in the Tate Modern winter last year, and i stumbled across it again the other day when discussing with a friend photographers that we liked. And i have to say that since revisiting the work i feel a different connection with it. Originally in the gallery i feel i was overwhelmed, these large spaces, rooms that lead onto another room, with hundreds of portraits all composed in the same way and lined up in grids that explored heritage and consequence...

 But now when i think about the work, i think about the people more individually. Some portraits in the grids were left blank, and this was where a member of the bloodline was missing - and this depicts the consequence part of Taryn Simons work. Though we cannot control or have any decision on who is in our family by blood, we control the situations in life and have an effect on these things.

But it's not only human bloodlines that Taryn Simon has explored, she also looked at this collection of rabbits. "24 European rabbits introduced to Australia in 1859. Within one hundred years, the rabbit population grew to half a billion. We are looking at 108 rabbits, all destined for a premature death as the subjects of a test to determine the effectiveness of a virus used to control the explosive rabbit population. Some wide-eyed specimens look alert to their impending doom and others, innocently oblivious. Even the pragmatic observer, when faced with man’s control and mis-control of nature may feel their nose twitch. " (taken from Foto8) and this is one piece of the work that has stayed in my mind since seeing the exhibition because of the connection between nature and humans, the roles we play in the handling of lives, as if we are god.

http://www.foto8.com/new/online/reviews/1439-taryn-simon-a-living-man

http://tarynsimon.com/works_livingmanindex.php