Taryn Simon’s exhibit of large-format photographs has its roots in an assignment from the New York Times Magazine in 2000. The magazine asked her to photograph a handful of wrongfully convicted men who’d been on death row. Simon found that while some were angry and others were forgiving, all had been devastated. “They would tell me about the process by which they were convicted,” she says, “and it often involved a victim responding to a photograph presented by law enforcement, and then having to deal with her personal memory of the experience.” The process was frequently flawed–sometimes the police would show the victim two sets of photos in which one picture repeated.
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The daughter of an amateur photographer, Simon says she grew up with lots of weekend slide shows: “My parents relate to the past through photographs, and I’ve always been interested in the way photographs replace memories.” After the assignment was done, she began researching wrongful convictions and the role photography plays in the legal system. Reminded of the importance of context in photography, she included captions with this set of portraits. Her book, The Innocents, includes even more explanatory text.
While attending Brown University, Simon took classes at the Rhode Island School of Design and discovered large-format photography. “I liked the complexity of it combined with the beauty. The resolution is amazing.” For magazine assignments, she shot her subjects–Chechen fighters and members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, normally shown in fleeting moments–with a four-by-five camera, carefully lighting and composing her portraits. In this series, too, she tried to honor the serious subject matter. “These are people who have only been presented photographically in very degraded terms, in old photos poorly reproduced or through their mug shots.” When “The Innocents” opened in New York in 2003, the Life After Exoneration Project flew her subjects in. Most still live in fear or are haunted by their convictions. Some lost their families while they were in prison, many are unemployed, and others are working at jobs far below their capabilities. “When you go for a job interview, you have to say you’ve been in prison,” Simon says, “so they’re going with newspaper clippings to show their innocence.” After the book came out, they had additional proof.
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