Art Photo Index Bookstore Gallery Auctions Blog Editions VisualServer
  View Order Wish List Your Account
 
BEST OF 2012
BEST OF 2011
BEST OF 2010
BEST OF 2009
BACK TO BLOG HOME f.a.q.mastheadinquiriesfeedbackadvertisenewsletter
THE BEST BOOKS OF 2011
SELECTED BY
Gerry Badger
Todd Hido
Raymond Meeks
Adam Bell
Darius Himes
Kevin Messina
Susan Burnstine
John Jenkins
Aron Morel
Marco Delogu
Anne Kelly
Martin Parr
Antone Dolezal
Anouk Kruithof
Cliff Shapiro
Sven Ehmann
Kevin Kunishi
Alec Soth
Horacio Fernández
Shane Lavalette
Gordon Stettinius
John Gossage
Larissa Leclair
Elisabeth Tonnard
Lauren Henkin
Melanie McWhorter
Selected by:
  • Melanie McWhorter
A Living Man Declared Dead & Other Chapters.
Photographs by Taryn Simon. Texts by Homi K Bhaba and Geoffrey Batchen.
Mack.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is a significant and extensive book of a major new body of work by the American artist Taryn Simon with texts by Homi K. Bhabha and Geoffrey Batchen, to accompany an exhibition at Tate Modern, London in May 2011 and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin in September 2011.

Over a four-year period, Simon traveled around the world recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each chapter, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects Simon documents include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein's son, Uday, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood and other components of fate.



Purchase A Living Man Declared Dead & Other Chapters.
ADVERTISEMENT
© photo-eye Magazine. This article is printed from photo-eye Magazine (http://www.photoeye.com/magazine/) and is intended for personal use. Please contact us if you would like permission to reprint this article for commercial or educational use. Text © by the author, all images © their respective owners. All rights reserved.
© PHOTO-EYE, LLC, 2018. All Rights Reserved Copyrights-Trademarks Privacy Policy Returns Policy Staff/Hours/Location 505.988.5152 info@photoeye.com