GralInt/ART-TED Talks-Taryn Simon: The stories behind the bloodlines/Photographs of secret sites

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Filmed November 2011 at TEDSalon London Fall 2011


Taryn Simon: The stories behind the bloodlines


Taryn Simon captures the essence of vast, generation-spanning stories by photographing the descendants of people at the center of the narrative. In this riveting talk she shows a stream of these stories from all over the world, investigating the nature of genealogy and the way our lives are shaped by the interplay of many different forces.
















































Transcript:



This is Shivdutt Yadav, and he's from Uttar Pradesh, India. Now Shivdutt was visiting the local land registry office in Uttar Pradesh, and he discovered that official records were listing him as dead. His land was no longer registered in his name. His brothers, Chandrabhan and Phoolchand, were also listed as dead.
Family members had bribed officials to interrupt the hereditary transfer of land by having the brothers declared dead, allowing them to inherit their father's share of the ancestral farmland. Because of this, all three brothers and their families had to vacate their home. According to the Yadav family, the local court has been scheduling a case review since 2001, but a judge has never appeared.
There are several instances in Uttar Pradesh of people dying before their case is given a proper review. Shivdutt's father's death and a want for his property led to this corruption. He was laid to rest in the Ganges River, where the dead are cremated along the banks of the river or tied to heavy stones and sunk in the water.
Photographing these brothers was a disorienting exchange because on paper they don't exist, and a photograph is so often used as an evidence of life. Yet, these men remain dead. This quandary led to the title of the project, which considers in many ways that we are all the living dead and that we in some ways represent ghosts of the past and the future.
So this story is the first of 18 chapters in my new body of work titled "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters." And for this work, I traveled around the world over a four-year period researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. I was interested in ideas surrounding fate and whether our fate is determined by blood, chance or circumstance. The subjects I documented ranged from feuding families in Brazil to victims of genocide in Bosnia to the first woman to hijack an airplane and the living dead in India. In each chapter, you can see the external forces of governance, power and territory or religion colliding with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance.
Each work that I make is comprised of three segments. On the left are one or more portrait panels in which I systematically order the members of a given bloodline. This is followed by a text panel, it's designed in scroll form, in which I construct the narrative at stake. And then on the right is what I refer to as a footnote panel. It's a space that's more intuitive in which I present fragments of the story, beginnings of other stories, photographic evidence. And it's meant to kind of reflect how we engage with histories or stories on the Internet, in a less linear form. So it's more disordered. And this disorder is in direct contrast to the unalterable order of a bloodline.
In my past projects I've often worked in serial form, documenting things that have the appearance of being comprehensive through a determined title and a determined presentation, but in fact, are fairly abstract. In this project I wanted to work in the opposite direction and find an absolute catalog, something that I couldn't interrupt, curate or edit by choice. This led me to blood. A bloodline is determined and ordered. But the project centers on the collision of order and disorder -- the order of blood butting up against the disorder represented in the often chaotic and violent stories that are the subjects of my chapters.
In chapter two, I photograph the descendants of Arthur Ruppin. He was sent in 1907 to Palestine by the Zionist organization to look at areas for Jewish settlement and acquire land for Jewish settlement. He oversaw land acquisition on behalf of the Palestine Land Development Company whose work led to the establishment of a Jewish state. Through my research at the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, I wanted to look at the early paperwork of the establishment of the Jewish state. And I found these maps which you see here. And these are studies commissioned by the Zionist organization for alternative areas for Jewish settlement. In this, I was interested in the consequences of geography and imagining how the world would be different if Israel were in Uganda, which is what these maps demonstrate. These archives in Jerusalem, they maintain a card index file of the earliest immigrants and applicants for immigration to Palestine, and later Israel, from 1919 to 1965.
Chapter three: Joseph Nyamwanda Jura Ondijo treated patients outside of Kisumu, Kenya for AIDS, tuberculosis, infertility, mental illness, evil spirits. He's most often paid for his services in cash, cows or goats. But sometimes when his female patients can't afford his services, their families give the women to Jura in exchange for medical treatment. As a result of these transactions, Jura has nine wives, 32 children and 63 grandchildren. In his bloodline you see the children and grandchildren here.
Two of his wives were brought to him suffering from infertility and he cured them, three for evil spirits, one for an asthmatic condition and severe chest pain and two wives Ondijo claims he took for love, paying their families a total of 16 cows. One wife deserted him and another passed away during treatment for evil spirits. Polygamy is widely practiced in Kenya. It's common among a privileged class capable of paying numerous dowries and keeping multiple homes. Instances of prominent social and political figures in polygamous relationships has led to the perception of polygamy as a symbol of wealth, status and power.
You may notice in several of the chapters that I photographed there are empty portraits. These empty portraits represent individuals, living individuals, who couldn't be present. And the reasons for their absence are given in my text panel. They include dengue fever, imprisonment, army service, women not allowed to be photographed for religious and cultural reasons. And in this particular chapter, it's children whose mothers wouldn't allow them to travel to the photographic shoot for fear that their fathers would kidnap them during it.
Twenty-four European rabbits were brought to Australia in 1859 by a British settler for sporting purposes, for hunting. And within a hundred years, that population of 24 had exploded to half a billion. The European rabbit has no natural predators in Australia, and it competes with native wildlife and damages native plants and degrades the land. Since the 1950s, Australia has been introducing lethal diseases into the wild rabbit population to control growth. These rabbits were bred at a government facility, Biosecurity Queensland, where they bred three bloodlines of rabbits and have infected them with a lethal disease and are monitoring their progress to see if it will effectively kill them. So they're testing its virulence. During the course of this trial, all of the rabbits died, except for a few, which were euthanized.
Haigh's Chocolate, in collaboration with the Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia, stopped all production of the Easter Bunny in chocolate and has replaced it with the Easter Bilby. Now this was done to counter the annual celebration of rabbits and presumably make the public more comfortable with the killing of rabbits and promote an animal that's native to Australia, and actually an animal that is threatened by the European rabbit.
In chapter seven, I focus on the effects of a genocidal act on one bloodline. So over a two-day period, six individuals from this bloodline were killed in the Srebrenica massacre. This is the only work in which I visually represent the dead. But I only represent those that were killed in the Srebrenica massacre, which is recorded as the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War. And during this massacre, 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically executed.
So when you look at a detail of this work, you can see, the man on the upper-left is the father of the woman sitting next to him. Her name is Zumra. She is followed by her four children, all of whom were killed in the Srebrenica massacre. Following those four children is Zumra's younger sister who is then followed by her children who were killed as well. During the time I was in Bosnia, the mortal remains of Zumra's eldest son were exhumed from a mass grave. And I was therefore able to photograph the fully assembled remains. However, the other individuals are represented by these blue slides, which show tooth and bone samples that were matched to DNA evidence collected from family members to prove they were the identities of those individuals. They've all been given a proper burial, so what remains are these blue slides at the International Commission for Missing Persons.
These are personal effects dug up from a mass grave that are awaiting identification from family members and graffiti at the Potochari battery factory, which was where the Dutch U.N. soldiers were staying, and also the Serbian soldiers later during the times of the executions. This is video footage used at the Milosevic trial, which from top to bottom shows a Serbian scorpion unit being blessed by an Orthodox priest before rounding up the boys and men and killing them.
Chapter 15 is more of a performance piece. I solicited China's State Council Information Office in 2009 to select a multi-generational bloodline to represent China for this project. They chose a large family from Beijing for its size, and they declined to give me any further reasoning for their choice. This is one of the rare situations where I have no empty portraits. Everyone showed up. You can also see the evolution of the one-child-only policy as it travels through the bloodline.
Previously known as the Department of Foreign Propaganda, the State Council Information Office is responsible for all of China's external publicity operations. It controls all foreign media and image production outside of China from foreign media working within China. It also monitors the Internet and instructs local media on how to handle any potentially controversial issues, including Tibet, ethnic minorities, Human Rights, religion, democracy movements and terrorism. For the footnote panel in this work, this office instructed me to photograph their central television tower in Beijing. And I also photographed the gift bag they gave me when I left.
These are the descendants of Hans Frank who was Hitler's personal legal advisor and governor general of occupied Poland. Now this bloodline includes numerous empty portraits, highlighting a complex relationship to one's family history. The reasons for these absences include people who declined participation. There's also parents who participated who wouldn't let their children participate because they thought they were too young to decide for themselves. Another section of the family presented their clothing, as opposed to their physical presence, because they didn't want to be identified with the past that I was highlighting. And finally, another individual sat for me from behind and later rescinded his participation, so I had to pixelate him out so he's unrecognizable.
In the footnote panel that accompanies this work I photographed an official Adolph Hitler postage stamp and an imitation of that stamp produced by British Intelligence with Hans Frank's image on it. It was released in Poland to create friction between Frank and Hitler, so that Hitler would imagine Frank was trying to usurp his power.
Again, talking about fate, I was interested in the stories and fate of particular works of art. These paintings were taken by Hans Frank during the time of the Third Reich. And I'm interested in the impact of their absence and presence through time. They are Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady With an Ermine," Rembrandt's "Landscape With Good Samaritan" and Raphael's "Portrait of a Youth," which has never been found.
Chapter 12 highlights people being born into a battle that is not of their making, but becomes their own. So this is the Ferraz family and the Novaes family. And they are in an active blood feud. This feud has been going on since 1991 in Northeast Brazil in Pernambuco, and it involved the deaths of 20 members of the families and 40 others associated with the feud, including hired hit men, innocent bystanders and friends. Tensions between these two families date back to 1913 when there was a dispute over local political power. But it got violent in the last two decades and includes decapitation and the death of two mayors. Installed into a protective wall surrounding the suburban home of Louis Novaes, who's the head of the Novaes family, are these turret holes, which were used for shooting and looking.
Brazil's northeast state of Pernambuco is one of the nation's most violent regions. It's rooted in a principle of retributive justice, or an eye for an eye, so retaliatory killings have led to several deaths in the area. This story, like many of the stories in my chapters, reads almost as an archetypal episode, like something out of Shakespeare, that's happening now and will happen again in the future. I'm interested in these ideas of repetition. So after I returned home, I received word that one member of the family had been shot 30 times in the face.
Chapter 17 is an exploration of the absence of a bloodline and the absence of a history. Children at this Ukrainian orphanage are between the ages of six and 16. This piece is ordered by age because it can't be ordered by blood. In a 12-month period when I was at the orphanage, only one child had been adopted. Children have to leave the orphanage at age 16, despite the fact that there's often nowhere for them to go. It's commonly reported in Ukraine that children, when leaving the orphanage are targeted for human trafficking, child pornography and prostitution. Many have to turn to criminal activity for their survival, and high rates of suicide are recorded.
This is a boys' bedroom. There's an insufficient supply of beds at the orphanage and not enough warm clothing. Children bathe infrequently because the hot water isn't turned on until October. This is a girls' bedroom. And the director listed the orphanage's most urgent needs as an industrial size washing machine and dryer, four vacuum cleaners, two computers, a video projector, a copy machine, winter shoes and a dentist's drill. This photograph, which I took at the orphanage of one of the classrooms, shows a sign which I had translated when I got home. And it reads: "Those who do not know their past are not worthy of their future."
There are many more chapters in this project. This is just an abridged rendering of over a thousand images. And this mass pile of images and stories forms an archive. And within this accumulation of images and texts, I'm struggling to find patterns and imagine that the narratives that surround the lives we lead are just as coded as blood itself. But archives exist because there's something that can't necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information that's collected. And there's this relentless persistence of birth and death and an unending collection of stories in between. It's almost machine-like the way people are born and people die, and the stories keep coming and coming. And in this, I'm considering, is this actual accumulation leading to some sort of evolution, or are we on repeat over and over again?
Thank you.
(Applause)







Filmed July 2009 at TEDGlobal 2009


Taryn Simon: Photographs of secret sites



Taryn Simon exhibits her startling take on photography — to reveal worlds and people we would never see otherwise. She shares two projects: one documents otherworldly locations typically kept secret from the public, the other involves haunting portraits of men convicted for crimes they did not commit.
























































Transcript:




Okay, so 90 percent of my photographic process is, in fact, not photographic. It involves a campaign of letter writing, research and phone calls to access my subjects, which can range from Hamas leaders in Gaza to a hibernating black bear in its cave in West Virginia. And oddly, the most notable letter of rejection I ever received came from Walt Disney World, a seemingly innocuous site.
And it read -- I'm just going to read a key sentence: "Especially during these violent times, I personally believe that the magical spell cast upon guests who visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to."
Photography threatens fantasy. They didn't want to let my camera in because it confronts constructed realities, myths and beliefs, and provides what appears to be evidence of a truth. But there are multiple truths attached to every image, depending on the creator's intention, the viewer and the context in which it is presented.
Over a five year period following September 11th, when the American media and government were seeking hidden and unknown sites beyond its borders, most notably weapons of mass destruction, I chose to look inward at that which was integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning. I wanted to confront the boundaries of the citizen, self-imposed and real, and confront the divide between privileged and public access to knowledge.
It was a critical moment in American history and global history where one felt they didn't have access to accurate information. And I wanted to see the center with my own eyes, but what I came away with is a photograph. And it's just another place from which to observe, and the understanding that there are no absolute, all-knowing insiders. And the outsider can never really reach the core.
I'm going to run through some of the photographs in this series. It's titled, "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar," and it's comprised of nearly 70 images. In this context I'll just show you a few. This is a nuclear waste storage and encapsulation facility at Hanford site in Washington State, where there are over 1,900 stainless steel capsules containing nuclear waste submerged in water. A human standing in front of an unprotected capsule would die instantly. And I found one section amongst all of these that actually resembled the outline of the United States of America, which you can see here.
And a big part of the work that is sort of absent in this context is text. So I create these two poles. Every image is accompanied with a very detailed factual text. And what I'm most interested in is the invisible space between a text and its accompanying image, and how the image is transformed by the text and the text by the image. So, at best, the image is meant to float away into abstraction and multiple truths and fantasy. And then the text functions as this cruel anchor that kind of nails it to the ground. But in this context I'm just going to read an abridged version of those texts.
This is a cryopreservation unit, and it holds the bodies of the wife and mother of cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger, who hoped to be awoken one day to extended life in good health, with advancements in science and technology, all for the cost of 35 thousand dollars, for forever.
This is a 21-year-old Palestinian woman undergoing hymenoplasty. Hymenoplasty is a surgical procedure which restores the virginal state, allowing her to adhere to certain cultural expectations regarding virginity and marriage. So it essentially reconstructs a ruptured hymen, allowing her to bleed upon having sexual intercourse, to simulate the loss of virginity.
This is a jury simulation deliberation room, and you can see beyond that two-way mirror jury advisers standing in a room behind the mirror. And they observe deliberations after mock trial proceedings so that they can better advise their clients how to adjust their trial strategy to have the outcome that they're hoping for. This process costs 60,000 dollars.
This is a U.S. Customs and Border Protection room, a contraband room, at John F. Kennedy International Airport. On that table you can see 48 hours' worth of seized goods from passengers entering in to the United States. There is a pig's head and African cane rats. And part of my photographic work is I'm not just documenting what's there. I do take certain liberties and intervene. And in this I really wanted it to resemble an early still-life painting, so I spent some time with the smells and items.
This is the exhibited art on the walls of the CIA in Langley, Virginia, their original headquarters building. And the CIA has had a long history with both covert and public cultural diplomacy efforts. And it's speculated that some of their interest in the arts was designed to counter Soviet communism and promote what it considered to be pro-American thoughts and aesthetics. And one of the art forms that elicited the interest of the agency, and had thus come under question, is abstract expressionism.
This is the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, and on a six acre plot there are approximately 75 cadavers at any given time that are being studied by forensic anthropologists and researchers who are interested in monitoring a rate of corpse decomposition. And in this particular photograph the body of a young boy has been used to reenact a crime scene.
This is the only federally funded site where it is legal to cultivate cannabis for scientific research in the United States. It's a research crop marijuana grow room.
And part of the work that I hope for is that there is a sort of disorienting entropy where you can't find any discernible formula in how these things -- they sort of awkwardly jump from government to science to religion to security -- and you can't completely understand how information is being distributed.
These are transatlantic submarine communication cables that travel across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, connecting North America to Europe. They carry over 60 million simultaneous voice conversations, and in a lot of the government and technology sites there was just this very apparent vulnerability. This one is almost humorous because it feels like I could just snip all of that conversation in one easy cut. But stuff did feel like it could have been taken 30 or 40 years ago, like it was locked in the Cold War era and hadn't necessarily progressed.
This is a Braille edition of Playboy magazine. (Laughter) And this is ... a division of the Library of Congress produces a free national library service for the blind and visually impaired, and the publications they choose to publish are based on reader popularity. And Playboy is always in the top few. (Laughter) But you'd be surprised, they don't do the photographs. It's just the text. (Laughter)
This is an avian quarantine facility where all imported birds coming into America are required to undergo a 30-day quarantine, where they are tested for diseases including Exotic Newcastle Disease and Avian Influenza. This film shows the testing of a new explosive fill on a warhead. And the Air Armament Center at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida is responsible for the deployment and testing of all air-delivered weaponry coming from the United States. And the film was shot on 72 millimeter, government-issue film. And that red dot is a marking on the government-issue film.
All living white tigers in North America are the result of selective inbreeding -- that would be mother to son, father to daughter, sister to brother -- to allow for the genetic conditions that create a salable white tiger. Meaning white fur, ice blue eyes, a pink nose. And the majority of these white tigers are not born in a salable state and are killed at birth. It's a very violent process that is little known. And the white tiger is obviously celebrated in several forms of entertainment. Kenny was born. He actually made it to adulthood. He has since passed away, but was mentally retarded and suffers from severe bone abnormalities.
This, on a lighter note, is at George Lucas' personal archive. This is the Death Star. And it's shown here in its true orientation. In the context of "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi," its mirror image is presented. They flip the negative. And you can see the photoetched brass detailing, and the painted acrylic facade. In the context of the film, this is a deep-space battle station of the Galactic Empire, capable of annihilating planets and civilizations, and in reality it measures about four feet by two feet. (Laughter)
This is at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. It's a Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain site. Essentially they've simulated a city for urban combat, and this is one of the structures that exists in that city. It's called the World Church of God. It's supposed to be a generic site of worship. And after I took this photograph, they constructed a wall around the World Church of God to mimic the set-up of mosques in Afghanistan or Iraq. And I worked with Mehta Vihar who creates virtual simulations for the army for tactical practice. And we put that wall around the World Church of God, and also used the characters and vehicles and explosions that are offered in the video games for the army. And I put them into my photograph.
This is live HIV virus at Harvard Medical School, who is working with the U.S. Government to develop sterilizing immunity.
And Alhurra is a U.S. Government- sponsored Arabic language television network that distributes news and information to over 22 countries in the Arab world. It runs 24 hours a day, commercial free. However, it's illegal to broadcast Alhurra within the United States. And in 2004, they developed a channel called Alhurra Iraq, which specifically deals with events occurring in Iraq and is broadcast to Iraq.
Now I'm going to move on to another project I did. It's titled "The Innocents." And for the men in these photographs, photography had been used to create a fantasy. Contradicting its function as evidence of a truth, in these instances it furthered the fabrication of a lie. I traveled across the United States photographing men and women who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit, violent crimes.
I investigate photography's ability to blur truth and fiction, and its influence on memory, which can lead to severe, even lethal consequences. For the men in these photographs, the primary cause of their wrongful conviction was mistaken identification. A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement's use of images. But through exposure to composite sketches, Polaroids, mug shots and line-ups, eyewitness testimony can change.
I'll give you an example from a case. A woman was raped and presented with a series of photographs from which to identify her attacker. She saw some similarities in one of the photographs, but couldn't quite make a positive identification. Days later, she is presented with another photo array of all new photographs, except that one photograph that she had some draw to from the earlier array is repeated in the second array. And a positive identification is made because the photograph replaced the memory, if there ever was an actual memory.
Photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals, and the criminal justice system failed to recognize the limitations of relying on photographic identifications.
Frederick Daye, who is photographed at his alibi location, where 13 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime. He was convicted by an all-white jury of rape, kidnapping and vehicle theft. And he served 10 years of a life sentence. Now DNA exonerated Frederick and it also implicated another man who was serving time in prison. But the victim refused to press charges because she claimed that law enforcement had permanently altered her memory through the use of Frederick's photograph.
Charles Fain was convicted of kidnapping, rape and murder of a young girl walking to school. He served 18 years of a death sentence. I photographed him at the scene of the crime at the Snake River in Idaho. And I photographed all of the wrongfully convicted at sites that came to particular significance in the history of their wrongful conviction. The scene of arrest, the scene of misidentification, the alibi location. And here, the scene of the crime, it's this place to which he's never been, but changed his life forever. So photographing there, I was hoping to highlight the tenuous relationship between truth and fiction, in both his life and in photography.
Calvin Washington was convicted of capital murder. He served 13 years of a life sentence in Waco, Texas.
Larry Mayes, I photographed at the scene of arrest, where he hid between two mattresses in Gary, Indiana, in this very room to hide from the police. He ended up serving 18 and a half years of an 80 year sentence for rape and robbery. The victim failed to identify Larry in two live lineups and then made a positive identification, days later, from a photo array.
Larry Youngblood served eight years of a 10 and half year sentence in Arizona for the abduction and repeated sodomizing of a 10 year old boy at a carnival. He is photographed at his alibi location.
Ron Williamson. Ron was convicted of the rape and murder of a barmaid at a club, and served 11 years of a death sentence. I photographed Ron at a baseball field because he had been drafted to the Oakland A's to play professional baseball just before his conviction. And the state's key witness in Ron's case was, in the end, the actual perpetrator.
Ronald Jones served eight years of a death sentence for rape and murder of a 28-year-old woman. I photographed him at the scene of arrest in Chicago.
William Gregory was convicted of rape and burglary. He served seven years of a 70 year sentence in Kentucky.
Timothy Durham, who I photographed at his alibi location where 11 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime, was convicted of 3.5 years of a 3220 year sentence, for several charges of rape and robbery. He had been misidentified by an 11-year-old victim.
Troy Webb is photographed here at the scene of the crime in Virginia. He was convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery, and served seven years of a 47 year sentence. Troy's picture was in a photo array that the victim tentatively had some draw toward, but said he looked too old. The police went and found a photograph of Troy Webb from four years earlier, which they entered into a photo array days later, and he was positively identified.
Now I'm going to leave you with a self portrait. And it reiterates that distortion is a constant, and our eyes are easily deceived. That's it. Thank you. (Applause)