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P.S.1
Contemporary Art Center presents photographs and a documentary by Taryn
Simon, whose body of work, titled The
Innocents, documents the stories of individuals across the country
who served time for violent crimes they did not commit.
These works question photography’s use as eyewitness account,
acknowledging that unjust convictions often result from a victim’s
response to photographs and lineups in law enforcement’s
identification process.
In
the summer of 2000, Simon was assigned by the New
York Times Magazine to photograph men who were wrongfully convicted,
imprisoned, exonerated and subsequently freed from death row.
This project inspired her to apply for and be awarded a John
Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography to travel across
the United States photographing and interviewing individuals who were
unfairly convicted. The primary cause of these errors was mistaken
identification. In the
history of these cases, photography offered the criminal justice system
a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals, assisted
officers in obtaining eyewitness identification, and aided prosecutors
in securing convictions.
Simon
photographed these men at sites that had particular significance to
their illegitimate conviction: the scene of misidentification, the scene
of arrest, the scene of the crime or the scene of the alibi.
All of these locations have been assigned contradictory meanings
for the subjects. The scene
of arrest marks the starting point of a reality based in fiction.
The scene of the crime is at once arbitrary and crucial: this
place, to which they have never been, changed their lives forever.
In these photographs Simon confronts photography’s ability to
blur truth and fiction—an ambiguity that can have severe, even lethal
consequences.
Simon’s
work will be published this spring by Umbrage Editions in a book titled The
Innocents. This book
includes photographs and interviews by Simon as well as a foreword and
case profiles by leading civil rights attorneys Peter Neufeld and Barry
Scheck, who founded the Innocence Project ten years ago and are
responsible for most of the postconviction DNA exonerations in the
United States today.
Taryn
Simon was born in 1975 in New York and is a graduate of Brown
University. Simon’s
photographs have been exhibited internationally and featured in several
publications, including The New
York Times Magazine, Vanity
Fair and The New Yorker.
Taryn Simon: The Innocents is
organized by P.S.1 Chief Curator Klaus Biesenbach and P.S.1 Exhibition
Coordinator Amy Smith Stewart.
For
more information, please contact Rachael Dorsey, P.S.1 Press Office, at press@ps1.org
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