Tate New Art Season: When Photography Meets Documentary
Simon Baker, Tate Modern's Curator of Photography and International Art, presented on Monday at Hay Festival the gallery’s new photographic season.
Baker discussed with artist Taryn Simon about the outstanding potential that this form of visual art has of chronicling events, especially when the photographic medium is blended with the photographer's need to document reality. He showed to the audience flocked to the Wales Stage some of the most relevant additions that were made over the last decade to the Tate Collection, that are currently on display on the fifth-floor of the gallery, containing thought-provoking developments of the documentary form. “The work of Luc Delahaye,” – he explained – “is probably the best example of the movement from photojournalism to the walls of galleries and museums.” “Delahaye worked for a news agency and produced images of hard content for newspapers and magazines, after which he changed his way of taking pictures to make them suitable to a museum and its audience.”
The New York born photographer Taryn Simon, is one of the highlights of Tate’s new photographic season. Commenting upon her work, A living man declared dead and other chapters, Simon recalled: “This is a work project that I have been creating over a period of four years, during which I have been travelling around the world recording blood lines and related stories,” she explained.
‘In each work, I have documented the forces that circumstances, government and religion play in determining the lives of the individual, by colliding with the internal ones, such as psychological or physical inheritances. The result is far away from simply ‘being there’ and ‘telling the truth’, it is rather a creative process.” “Many of the stories that I document in this work are archetypal episodes that the observer can interpret as versions of the past, or of the future, but that are happening now.”
Simon’s artistic endeavour is concerned with documenting the story of people who have died across the world in wars and poverty. A living man declared dead displays a sequence of pictures in which each person is juxtaposed, on the left side, with the portraits of the relatives who survived her and who are portrayed in a seated position. On the right side are pictures that illustrate the life story of the dead. The subjects of these touching stories range from feuding families in Brazil to victims of genocide in Bosnia, from human 'exhibitions' in the United States to the living dead in India.