Taryn Simon at the Guggenheim Museum

by Jonathan Blaustein Taryn Simon has been one of my favorite photographers for a while now. I used her seminal book, “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” as a teaching tool for years, during a lecture about photo books. For the uninitiated, Taryn Simon is an investigative artist, with a team of researchers, (and access to the Upper Class via multiple routes,) so her ability to gain entry to places inaccessible to the rest of us, and put financial and human resources towards ambitious projects, is unrivaled. Her book fascinated me, as it is both spare and super-grandiose at the same time. One large format-photographic image was laid out per page, paired with a paragraph of text explaining why she’s photographed inside a secret bunker in Colorado, or a Nazi group, or Orthodox Jews, or inside the CIA. Pulling off maximalist ideas in a minimalist format is insanely difficult. Needless to say, when I was in NYC last week, and had a chance to see her new show, “Father Country I…