Taryn Simon

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The Picture Collection itself has adopted certain qualities of its content beginning to function as an imprint of the age registering changes taking place. The curator’s reliance on presupposed credibility of photographic medium delineates photography ‘as comprehensive, unbiased record of the visual aspects of human knowledge ... consulted and borrowed for information, to answer specific search[es] for facts.”[5]In Javitz’ writings we can find an important witness of the perception and changing perspective on the collection. Operating as an image reservoir open to the current demands it was at the same time constantly reconstituted and reshaped by these demands. So that in 1933 after the Prohibition of alcohol in the US was repealed Javitz comments:

As in other years, requests kept apace with newspaper headlines. In the wake of Repeal, came search for images of whiskey flasks and Burgundy labels ... Mae West brought requests for mustache cups ... Picture requests for pogroms, burning of books in other days, revolutions ... round out the year’s interests.[6]

Whereas during the W W II the Collection gets requests from American Military Service for Japanese landscapes, in a certain way epitomising the relation to photographic capacities and potential in documentation and factuality.

The unconditional trust to the credibility of photographic medium underpins the assertion of the image as a new universal means of communication, a revolutionary alternative proposed by the technical progress and moving interaction to a new age, to new order. Text here appears secondary, subordinated element. An image can ‘tell’ immediately and unmistakably something that language would attempt to do in vain. Pictures become new words, more successful than their predecessors in their in the capacity to transmit meaning. Such attitude towards images’ superiority over text is manifested in the peculiar nature of classification with its contingent approach to titles and headings. Which again reflected what was needed at the moment.

The Collection’s approach to system of classification with its recontextualisation and change of headings and titles and references of files and pictures in the files adjusting them to the current demand is remarkably prophetic. At large and in detail in foreshadow the pattern that underlie the contemporary image environment we are living in. This cloud of images is indexed, coded and tagged all and through is at the very same time and by the very same token as the New York Picture Collection, is subject to constant change and recontextualisation on demand.

In the present time when the exponentially growing number of people are encountered with media reality of myriads of circulating images and turning to google search has become a quotidian activity, the innovation strategy proposed by the New York library seems as remote and outdated with its ‘mechanical’ basis and at the same time almost improbably futuristic. Constellations of images are levitating in a wide space of the unfilled blank area within the frame, allowing the viewer to continue the row of pictures virtually to add another and another picture in imagination. Files themselves are made part of the exposition as well. So that one can inspect in person the intricate logic behind the classification process: tags, notes, comments, links. The association with todays search systems interface is inevitably comes to one’s mind. The exposition unfolds as a mechanised google picture storerooms.

With the distance of almost a century now, to see the archive re-examined and recontextualised by the artist, The Picture Collection enables to study the itinerary of the changing role of picture in our daily life, as well as the changes brought about by pictures. The Picture Collection archive serves as a reservoir of memory that has been transmitted to the visual document, whose meaning nevertheless is strongly dependent on the context. As good example can be found in Simon’s frame ‘Cats’, that back in 1940s was regarded as nothing more than pets, today has an immediate response in our collective memory with the Internet mania for a cat image resulting in the avalanche of cats picture spread around in the web. To which extent the role of image is revelational still is a question. In any case there is no doubt that photographic image and its serial reproduction has profoundly changed our relation to memory and perception of reality.

As the collection itself was built up by gift-contribution that is to say was dependent on chance, on the unpredictable contributor’s choice, thus it more remarkable that this collection on the other hand transmitted the same aspect of contingency to its reception by a potential library user, who would being in search for a picture of contemporaneous New York face a set of pictures attributed to this or that classification file represent and form the image of the city. Thereby what once was an accident, later has become a convention.

The utter belief in image as a universal means of communication, a certain substitute for language, that has demonstrated its numerous flaws and has given away many times people in their futile attempts to find consensus through out the history, is questioned in another later work of Simon’s, which continues to examine the dichotomy between text and image. The project Image Atlas[7], realised by Simon together with a programmer Aaron Swartz, demonstrates the limitations of any language and the weakness of the link bounding text and image in the structure of search engines that are gradually becoming a global tool of searching for information/knowledge/fact/truth.

By contrast to The Picture Collection, Image Atlas is an entirely web-based project, accessible for any Internet user no matter of location. It is presented by an image search engine that enables to enter a word and then shows the resulting images drawn, by means of Google Translate, from search systems of various countries including Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Iran, New Zealand, North Korea, Russia, and the United States.

The results are strikingly different. One word causes to emerge very different pictures according to the country. Such that for example typing groceries call for pictures of a fruit stand in France, a bag of wheat in Russia, a robot in Syria, and no image North Korea. The lapse between text, image and meaning marks the impossibility of universal means of communication, pointing at still retained cultural particularities opposed to the generalisation, notwithstanding the totalising character of contemporary culture.

The question of representation and perception of an image, the relation of an image to actual reality is a constant theme of Simon is work.