Exhibit of the week: Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Through Feb. 24

Photographer Taryn Simon specializes in “stiff, formulaic, unflattering portraits,” said Jeffry Cudlin in the Washington City Paper. Her latest series, currently on view both in D.C. and at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, subjects some 16 families to an intentionally remote style of group portraiture: Each member sits alone in front of a wan backdrop, offering a blank stare, which then becomes a mute entry in a bland grid. This clinical approach extends in each case to a sidebar of text that describes the group’s distinguishing feature—that the patriarch of one family, for instance, is still alive but has been declared dead by Indian officials who’ve been bribed by relatives of the man who were eager to inherit his property. Despite the documentary aesthetic, “it’s hard to say that Simon’s ultimate goal is realism.” Instead, she seems determined to provide facts that never yield a particular message or insight.

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“The seeming absence of editorializing makes this a fascinating show to encounter,” said Sophie Gilbert in Washingtonian. There’s a darkness to each story in the series, whether the family line has been disrupted by a 1995 massacre in Bosnia or by birth defects linked to the drug thalidomide. On the occasions when Simon was unable to win participation from all of a family’s surviving members—as happened with the descendents of Adolf Hitler’s personal legal advisor—she includes in the grid a blank photo or some close facsimile. Eventually, you become acutely aware that certain matters that are beyond our control—“where we are born, to whom, and under what circumstances”—might be the determining factors in how our lives unfold. This is true even when Simon breaks pattern—to show us 120 children living in a Ukrainian orphanage and, elsewhere, 100 brown rabbits.

Those rabbits bring the whole project into “terrifying” focus, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. Photographed in the same manner as the humans, they are descendents of the 24 European rabbits introduced into Australia in 1859, and each, we learn, has been injected with a disease by researchers seeking to combat the critters’ disastrous population explosion. Yes, “we must harden our hearts against their cuteness,” accepting that they must die, and in that moment we suddenly stand in “exactly the same place as a mid-level bureaucrat authorizing the use of trucks for ethnic cleansing.” Those rabbits “make the banality of evil palpable.” The “hollow, dizzy feeling” you’ll have as you leave the exhibit is what happens when art shakes your faith in human progress.