For four years, the artist Taryn Simon travelled around the world, researching and recording the stories of eighteen bloodlines. Simon photographed the living ascendants and descendants of a single person or animal, juxtaposing these portraits with relevant public records and historical documents.
In 1858, twenty-four European rabbits were introduced as game to Australia, where they have no natural predators. A century later, their numbers had increased to half a billion, causing environmental depredation. In the nineteen-fifties, the country began introducing lethal diseases, including the myxoma virus, into the rabbit population.
In last week’s issue, we published a portfolio of photographs from this project. The video below, produced for our iPad edition, takes a look at the rabbit chapter.
Taryn Simon will exhibit “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I—XVIII,” at The Museum of Modern Art. Organized by curator Roxana Marcoci, the show coincides with the publication of a book of the same name, and runs from May 2nd to September 3rd, before continuing on to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.