American photographer Taryn Simon talks about her Tate Modern exhibition, ‘A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters’.
Simon mixes photography and text in a series works that chart family bloodlines. At the heart of each group of photographic portraits, carefully arranged as 18 horizontal family trees, is a compelling story. One set documents the relatives of an Iraqi man who was a body double for Saddam Hussein’s son; another show members of a religious sect in Lebanon who believe in reincarnation; while the exhibition title comes from a work about a living Indian man who was declared dead in official records. From feuding families in Brazil to victims of genocide in Bosnia, Simon forms a collection that maps the relationships between chance, blood and other components of fate.
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