Chapter XI from "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII"

Taryn Simon

2008–11 · Inkjet prints · Photographs

For her project A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII, Simon traveled the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen “chapters” in this work, legacies of territory, power, religion, and circumstance collide with psychological and physical inheritance. Her subjects include victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Here, she documents the descendants of Hans Frank, who was Hitler’s personal legal adviser, governor-general to Poland, and an avid collector of looted works of art. The left panel presents a grid of portraits of Frank’s descendants (the blank spaces represent living members of the bloodline who could not or would not be photographed). The panel on the right reproduces several works of art from Frank’s collection, including Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man (1513–14), which was taken from a Polish collection by Nazi troops during the Second World War and has never been recovered.

Artist

Taryn Simon

Date

2008–11

Medium

Inkjet prints

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of Michael and Jane Wilson, 2014