ideological criminal

When I was in Frankfurt in late September, I went to the Museum für Moderne Kunst and happened to catch the opening of Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. I was blown away. Simon’s photography is both stunning in its asthetics and astounding in its subjects. Moreover, the irony of having to travel to Germany to get a glimpse of a young and powerful artist exposing the unseeable in American culture and society was not lost on me. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but I knew of Simon’s earlier work from a New Yorker article about her book The Innocents, whose subjects have been accused and convicted of crimes they did not commit, often photographing them at the site of the crime. Simon’s work is smart beyond her years; each piece carries with it its full semantics and rattling insight into the pathology of everyday American life, and yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The MMK was also exhibited photographs from Larry Clark’s haunting Tulsa, which documents methamphetamine use among Clark and his friends, including a photo of a young pregnant woman shooting up meth. Another connection I didn’t make at the time was that Clark is the director of the film Kids.