Shedding Light on America’s Dark Recesses

“Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, Cherenkov Radiation,” taken at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State.
By BRIDGET L. GOODBODY @ New York Times

There’s something quintessentially American about the way Taryn Simon’s photography exhibition “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” examines the culture’s irreconcilable differences. Ms. Simon couches the show in the intellectual, power-to-the-people oratory of leftist politics. Yet she clearly delights in exposing, in a quasi-tabloid fashion, America’s underbelly.

Ms. Simon comes naturally to documenting places average citizens can’t access. For the State Department her father photographed Soviet cities during the cold war, restricted sites in Southeast Asia during the war in Vietnam and out-of-the way locations in Afghanistan, Israel and Iran in the 1970s.

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