{"id":449,"date":"2003-10-25T02:46:36","date_gmt":"2003-10-25T02:46:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/?p=449"},"modified":"2008-10-29T03:09:55","modified_gmt":"2008-10-29T03:09:55","slug":"taryn-simon-the-innocents-at-ps1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/2003\/10\/25\/taryn-simon-the-innocents-at-ps1\/","title":{"rendered":"Taryn Simon: ‘The Innocents’, at PS1"},"content":{"rendered":"

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine
\n

\"Taryn<\/a>
Taryn Simon: Larry Youngblood, Alibi location Tucson, Arizona, with Alice Laitner, Youngblood's girlfriend and alibi witness at trial. Served 8 years on a 10.5-year sentence for kidnapping, sexual assault and child molestation. 2002. C-Print, 46 x 59 cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\n\u201cI kept saying to my lawyer, \u2018Doesn\u2019t the truth have to come out?\u2019 And he\u2019d say, \u2018Nope, the truth don\u2019t have to come out.\u2019 But the truth is all coming out now. It\u2019s pretty wild.\u201d Taryn Simon\u2019s large-scale photographs of men like James O\u2019Donnell, who had this conversation with his lawyer, are anything but wild. Instead, their stillness conveys a sense that time has stopped. Commissioned by the lawyer activists of \u2018The Innocence Project,\u2019 Simon traveled around the country taking photographs and conducting interviews with men and women who were wrongly convicted of violent crimes and later exonerated by DNA evidence. Fifteen of the resulting forty-five portraits were exhibited at PS1 accompanied by an absorbing catalogue and a video of interview footage.<\/p>\n

Most of the subjects stand still, looking steadily at the camera with mix of anger and wariness as they pose in locations related to the crime or their alibi. One man lies under a filthy mattress in a seedy motel where the police found him, others appear in front of the rundown stores where they were arrested. Beauty finds its way into the tragedy in photos of a man seated in a field of what look like brilliant red and orange flowers, but which are actually broken targets at a skeet range. The more chilling scenes are those where crimes took place, like the shrubby riverbank illuminated solely by truck headlights or the flooded wood behind some houses.<\/p>\n

By photographing her subjects in a quiet setting usually alone or with a person related to their case, Simon extends the isolation of prison into the men\u2019s free life. The men, with their similar poses and expressions become icons of injustice who are only really understood as individuals in the videotaped footage. Here, emotions rush to the surface as they struggle to comprehend what has happened to them and the difficulty of finding a way forward. When he was in prison, Marvin Anderson explains, \u201cI used to make myself look at the world as being total darkness and me being the only person in it.\u201d Anderson and the others fought for and won their freedom, but in the eye of Simon\u2019s camera and a mistrustful society, many are still pretty much on their own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine \u201cI kept saying to my lawyer, \u2018Doesn\u2019t the truth have to come out?\u2019 And he\u2019d say, \u2018Nope, the truth don\u2019t have to come out.\u2019 But the truth is all coming out now. It\u2019s pretty wild.\u201d Taryn Simon\u2019s large-scale photographs of men like James O\u2019Donnell, who had this conversation with his lawyer, … <\/p>\n

Read more “Taryn Simon: ‘The Innocents’, at PS1”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[24],"tags":[8,18,9,15,14,13,12,17,10,16,11],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-art","tag-artist","tag-contemporary","tag-critic","tag-exhibition","tag-gallery","tag-new-york","tag-photography","tag-sculpture","tag-tour","tag-visual-art"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2BDOD-7f","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":451,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions\/451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}