18 Quotes by Taryn Simon

...photography's history is bound to the mistake, to the accident.

I want to see everything. I guess the positive version of not seeing or not knowing would be preservation of fantasy.

The photograph doesn't claim to be a participant, or to know, or to be a club member of whatever it's documenting - photography is more demanding when it doesn't pretend to know.

I'm designing a seductive frame to attract an audience to a subject they would otherwise ignore. And that's what I do in all of my photography - give a stage to things that wouldn't normally receive that stage.

Simulations directly relate to the process of and complications in photography. They also overtly create layers of fantasies, myths and interventions... The simulation confuses the idea of a truth. I've always been interested in this kind of theater and illusion at the foundation of belief.

Photography's ability to blur truth and fiction is one of its most compelling qualities. But when misused... this ambiguity can have severe, even lethal consequences.... Photography's ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another.

Archives exist because there’s something that can’t necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information.

I’m designing a seductive frame to attract an audience to a subject they would otherwise ignore. And that’s what I do in all of my photography – give a stage to things that wouldn’t normally receive that stage.

The photograph doesn’t claim to be a participant, or to know, or to be a club member of whatever it’s documenting – photography is more demanding when it doesn’t pretend to know.