Like Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum rotunda, where the biggest show of her career just opened, Taryn Simon’s work expands as it spirals. The 51-year-old photographer has made a career out of tracking strange cases to far-off places while probing the increasingly complex ways in which unseen structures of power creep into our lives. Now, in a major solo exhibition at the museum (on view through March 14), she’s telling a story that is both as big as the United States itself and more personal than anything she’s done before.
“It’s sucked me dry,” she says of the project, titled “Father Country I Do Love You.” The sprawling body of work explores the career of an unnamed federal agent across 42 “chapters” staged in distinct scenes along the museum’s ramp. Each one features text narrating an incredible episode from the agent’s career—hostage negotiations with Saddam Hussein, say, or a clandestine meeting with Gorbachev—and a series of related installations that, in typical Taryn Simon fashion, go off in unpredictable directions.
One chapter pairs the agent’s account of the sting operation that led to the arrest of Washington, DC, mayor Marion Barry with “look book” photos of apparel designed by the sister of the disgraced politician’s former mistress, who was used as bait in the setup. Another puts a text about the bombing of an abortion clinic next to a rendering of a pro-life memorial proposed by an extreme underground religious network. Again and again, Simon finds ways to reinsert touches of humanity into stories that have been strip-mined for headlines. But her digressions aren’t always easy to follow.
“It’s hard to sum up,” Simon says of her show in an interview ahead of the opening. The chapters, she explains, are “prismatic.” They are “looking at the shards of much larger events and the effects of an individual’s actions upon them. There’s an inseparable coexistence of contradictory states—violence and grace, grief and routine, responsibility and fantasy.”
With her long, tousled hair and signature skirted blouse (she wears a version of the same outfit almost every day), Simon typically cuts a picture of flowing elegance. But today, while speaking from a back room at the museum—a week-plus into a month-and-a-half-long installation process—she’s all jitters and flits. She is preparing to present not only her largest body of work, but also the largest body of work ever to debut at the Guggenheim. “I can’t imagine doing this again,” she says.
Simon’s process is exhaustive. Long before she grabs a camera, the New York-born and -based artist spends years researching the invisible threads that tether economics, politics, and pop culture. She has a talent for talking her way into closed-off spaces and a nose for complex narrative that takes her where no other artist goes. Her 2015 show “Paperwork and the Will of Capital” explored the role of performance in diplomacy by recreating the floral bouquets staged between presidents and prime ministers in historic photo-ops. In another project, “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” Simon photographed sites hidden from the public, including a nuclear waste facility, the CIA’s headquarters, and George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. Together, the photographs illustrate an irony that pervades much of the artist’s work: In showing us how images are used to construct myths, she calls her own authorial intentions into question.
“Father Country I Do Love You” was a decade in the making. Over that time, Simon was in near-constant contact with the show’s secret agent, always with an eager ear for his tales of life as a spook. She first became aware of him in 2017 while reviewing FBI files from the 1990s. She was interested in figures who had bit parts in history-making events and, as it turned out, this man had a Forrest Gumpian gift of showing up in just the right moments. The project spans the early 1990s, when he appeared as an extra on the set of The Silence of the Lambs (Jodie Foster makes a cameo in Simon’s show), to 2024, when he worked the Republican National Convention where Donald Trump made JD Vance his running mate.
The tableaux related to the agent are sandwiched by teak installations at the top and bottom of the Guggenheim’s ramp. Both are dedicated to Simon’s father and based on a tale he liked to tell about the mysterious death of the Thai silk magnate Jim Thompson. Like many of her father’s chestnuts, this one came from his time working for the State Department, and was often told with a selection of slides from the era. Her father, we’re told, took thousands of Kodachrome photos during his travels.
“Each came with a dramatic tale—delivering suitcases of cash to generals in Cambodia, yakuza threatening to break his arm in a door, having tea with his kidnappers in Lebanon, and starting the Thai stock exchange,” Simon writes in the exhibition’s introductory wall text. “He recorded everything and expected me to do the same.”
Her father’s adventures echo those of the federal agent, though how true the former’s stories are remains unclear, even to Simon. Her ability to discern fact from fantasy in these yarns only grew blurrier in the last years of her father’s life, when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. At times, across the show’s dense assemblages and thematic digressions, it’s hard to tell where the agent ends and her father begins. Did these men cross paths in real life? Does one’s story frame the other? Later in the introductory wall text, Simon quotes her father: “‘America,’ he said, ‘was the best story on earth if you could find someone to tell it.’” That may be the tale told in this exhibition, but good luck trying to identify exactly who the author is—and how trustworthy they are.
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