Simón

2020 · ref. 205262 — Paris: Editions 'Cahiers d'art' 2020. Hardcover. VG. Dark green leatherbound book with yellow text on the spine. The end pages are a heavy green fabric. Profusely illustrated with color tipped-in plates and many foldout displays. There are also black-and-white printed images. Pages focused on text are a pretty light green. "Taryn Simon's 'The Color of a Flea's Eye' presents a history of the New York Public Library's Picture Collection -- a legendary trove of more than one million prints photographs postcards posters and images from disused books and periodicals. Since its inception in 1915 the Picture Collection has been a vital resource for writers historians artists filmmakers fashion designers and advertising agencies. In her work The Picture Collection 2012-20 Simon born 1975 highlighted the impulse to organize visual information and pointed to the invisible hands behind seemingly neutral systems of image gathering. Each of Simon's photographs is made up of an array of images selected from a given subject folder such as Chiaroscuro Handshaking Haircombing Express Highways Financial Panics Israel and Beards and Mustaches. In artfully overlapped compositions only slices of the individual images are visible each fragment suggesting its whole. Simon sees this extensive archive of images as the precursor to internet search engines. Such an unlikely futurity in the past is at the core of the Picture Collection. The digital is foreshadowed in the analogue at the same time that history -- its classifications its contents -- seems the stuff of projection. Simon spent years sifting through letters memos and records that reveal an untold story between the library and artists media government and a broader public. These documents also divulge the removal and transfer of photographs from the democratically circulating picture-collection folders to the photography collection in the late 1980s when their marketplace value became apparent. Simon's selection of photographs from these transfers highlights gender immigration race and economy in America alongside the technical development of photography." Editions 'Cahiers d'art' hardcover books