[2] In 2000, Simon was given an assignment by New York Times Magazine to photograph men who had been wrongfully convicted, which inspired her to explore photography's role in the criminal justice system.
It will remain at the radon facility, Simon explained, "until its radioactive properties have diminished to levels deemed safe for human exposure and exhibition—approximately one thousand years after its creation.
"[9] An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar reveals objects, sites, and spaces that are integral to America's foundation, mythology, or daily functioning but remain inaccessible or unknown to a public audience.
These unseen subjects range from radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility to a black bear in hibernation to the art collection of the CIA.
She traveled to Jordan to shoot a young Iraqi actress, Zahra Alzubaidi, posed as if lying raped and burned, the victim of American soldiers.
[...] Alzubaidi has received death threats from family members, who consider Redacted pornographic, and is seeking asylum in the U.S. Simon arranged for the photograph to be shown at [2011]’s Venice Biennale to draw attention to Zubaidi’s situation.
It’s a labor.Simon's website says of A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I–XVIII: was produced over a four-year period (2008–2011), during which Simon traveled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories.
The subjects documented by Simon include: the Zionist and Jewish establishments in Pre-Israel Palestine, feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein's son Uday, and the living dead in India.
[17] In The Washington Post, Philip Kennicott wrote: Simon’s chapters, although seemingly dry and archival, emerge as remarkably profound meditations on how we sort through the world, what ethical and moral impulses we honor and which ones we squelch.
"[18]Contraband is "an archive of global desires and perceived threats, encompassing 1,075 images of items that were detained or seized from airline passengers and postal mail entering the United States"[19] from abroad, "taken at both the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the U.S.
"[20] From November 16 through 20, 2009, Simon "remained at JFK and continuously photographed items detained or seized from passengers and express mail entering the United States from abroad.
[24] In an extensive article on the Seven on Seven conference Ben Davis writes that "Simon suggested that the site might cut against 'the illusion of flattening' on the Web, offering some way of recovering a sense of the local.
In The Picture Collection, she "highlights the impulse to archive and organize visual information, and points to the invisible hands behind seemingly neutral systems of image gathering".
"[28] The first element of Simon's work is a photographic inventory of the women, weapons, and vehicles of James Bond films made over the past fifty years.
Items include copper and aluminum cables sold to scrap dealers; cement used by a father to build the walls of his daughter's bedroom; and an oak sapling that a worker took to Poland, planted, and named after his boss.
[29]The photographs and sculptures of Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) take as their subject matter the signings of political accords, contracts, treaties, and decrees in which powerful men flank floral centerpieces curated to convey the importance of the signatories and the institutions they represent.
The signings that inform Paperwork and the Will of Capital involve the countries present at the 1944 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which addressed the globalization of economies after World War II.
[32]Within a monumental sculptural setting, An Occupation of Loss combines performance, sound, and architecture and: considers the anatomy of grief and the intricate systems we use to manage contingencies of fate and the uncertain universe. . .
[33] Jerry Saltz described his experience of the performance and installation: After being admitted through a side second-story entrance, 50 or so viewers descend a long staircase to see 11 cement silos or circular towers almost 50 feet high, opened at the top and arranged in a semicircle.