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PUBLISHER
Cahiers d'Art

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 10 x 13.25 in. / 460 pgs / 57 color / 442 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2020 p. 32   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9782851173140 SDNR30
List Price: $150.00 CAD $210.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

TERRITORY
NA ONLY

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

New York, NY
New York Public Library, 09/01/21–02/27/22

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CAHIERS D'ART

Taryn Simon: The Color of a Flea’s Eye

The Picture Collection

Text by Joshua Chuang and Tim Griffin.

Taryn Simon: The Color of a Flea’s Eye

A tremendous feat of bookmaking, Taryn Simon’s The Color of a Flea’s Eye deploys prints, postcards and other ephemera to explore the organization of visual information through the New York Public Library's beloved archive

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.

Produced in direct collaboration with the artist, the book contains 57 individually hand tipped-in plates, numerous gatefolds and a variety of unique papers, as well as essays by Joshua Chuang, head of The New York Public Library’s Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, and Tim Griffin, executive director and chief curator at The Kitchen.


Featured image is reproduced from 'Taryn Simon: The Color of a Flea’s Eye.'

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

New York Times: Arts

Arthur Lubow

A huge book… It includes plates of the photo collages that Simon made in her studio by photographing images from folders that she arranged by hand. There is a rich history of [curator Ramona] Javitz and the Picture Collection, including correspondence and a list of all folder subject headings.

MoMA

Michelle Elligott

The Color of a Flea’s Eye encapsulates Simon’s longstanding interest in the visual exploration of institutions, systems of organization, networks, and kinship.

Brooklyn Rail

Megan Liberty

The book becomes, more than anything, about how images are used, digested, sorted, consumed by the public—itself another purposefully physical object.

Taryn Simon: The Color of a Flea’s Eye

in stock  $150.00


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TARYN SIMON MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS

Taryn Simon: The Innocents

TARYN SIMON: THE INNOCENTS

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

ISBN: 9781633450837
USD $85.00
| CAD $119

Pub Date: 4/5/2022
Active | In stock


Taryn Simon: The Color of a Flea’s Eye

TARYN SIMON: THE COLOR OF A FLEA’S EYE

Cahiers d'Art

ISBN: 9782851173140
USD $150.00
| CAD $210

Pub Date: 12/1/2020
Active | In stock


Taryn Simon: An Occupation of Loss

TARYN SIMON: AN OCCUPATION OF LOSS

Hatje Cantz

ISBN: 9783775743198
USD $75.00
| CAD $99

Pub Date: 2/27/2018
Active | Out of stock


Taryn Simon: Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies

TARYN SIMON: FIELD GUIDE TO BIRDS OF THE WEST INDIES

Hatje Cantz

ISBN: 9783775740920
USD $65.00
| CAD $90

Pub Date: 6/28/2016
Active | Out of stock


Taryn Simon: Contraband

TARYN SIMON: CONTRABAND

Hatje Cantz

ISBN: 9783775739719
USD $45.00
| CAD $62

Pub Date: 9/29/2015
Active | Out of stock


Taryn Simon: Birds of the West Indies

TARYN SIMON: BIRDS OF THE WEST INDIES

Hatje Cantz

ISBN: 9783775736633
USD $55.00
| CAD $75

Pub Date: 12/31/2013
Active | Out of stock