By 
Taryn Simon's shows always include photographs, which might make you inclined to call her a photographer, although this would be like calling Christo an upholsterer since so many of his works include fabric. There is always a prodigious amount of work leading up to Simon's final products, which document some relic of her research or incident of her exhaustive travels or byproduct of her mysterious obsessions. The unassuming shots, usually taken in a studio, in series that suggest taxonomies, represent her chosen objects or human subjects with near clinical precision but only begin to hint at the deeper motivations that have been driving her projects forward for years.
Simon is married to Jake Paltrow—they have two children together—and her gallery and museum openings invariably attract any number of figures from the Paltrow-Danner cinematic-vegetarian complex. It's a glamorous gaggle and she more than holds her own in their company. But don't let the glam factor distract you from her real contemporaries. She comes from a lineage that stretches back to photographic forebears like August Sander, and, along with contemporaries Rineke Dijkstra and Gillian Wearing, she has enlarged the conceptual canvas of photography, bringing in the quirkily academic approach that follows W.S. Sebald as much as it does the Bechers.
Her latest, "Paperwork and the Will of Capital," on view at Gagosian in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood through Saturday, and reappearing in Rome, on the Via Francesco Crispi 16, in April and May, takes flowers as the nominal subject of the works. Simon, with the help of a botanist, painstakingly researched and identified the precise flowers in the arrangements on the tables at formal signing ceremonies for any number of benighted treaties, like the nuclear fuel agreement signed in Iran in 2005 (pink gladiolas, yellow daffodils) or the impact study for a projected Ethiopian dam (Gerber daisies from the Netherlands, tea roses from Ethiopia); soon afterwards, Mohammad Morsi was caught on tape discussing military options for destroying the dam should it ever be built. The straight faced texts accompanying the photos make it clear how far short the signatories have fallen in their various ambitions.
