A Quote by Taryn Simon

Simulations directly relate to the process of and complications in photography. They also overtly create layers of fantasies, myths and interventions... The simulation confuses the idea of a truth. I've always been interested in this kind of theater and illusion at the foundation of belief.
The main difference seems to be that, whereas photography still claims some sort of objectivity, digital imaging is an overtly fictional process. As a practice that is known to be capable of nothing but fabrication, digitization abandons even the rhetoric of truth that has been such an important part of photography's cultural success.
When we make films - even 2D films - you're always trying to create this illusion of 3D, anyway. You're trying to create a believable world with characters walking, in and out of the perspective, to create the illusion that there's a world. The desire and drive to create this illusion of three-dimensional space is something that is true about every kind of film because you want the audience to really be experiencing it, first hand. It's a natural extension of the storytelling and the process of filmmaking.
I'm always interested in debunking myths if they are untrue. But it's also important to identify myths and how they function, what value they may have.
I've always been interested in socially political, or overtly political, comedy. And I guess I've always liked to channel some kind of personal element to that.
I was doing community theater, and I was always interested in acting, but I was also interested in sports. I was interested in a lot of things. I was a pretty normal guy. I wasn't like a guy who grew up in a dark theater watching movies.
Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
I've always seen process of crafting as part of the thinking process. It really forms the gestation of the work. I'll get an idea; I want to express this idea, sometimes I'll start it, but during the process of making the object - if it's an object or a painting - it changes. It never goes in a linear progression from A to Zed. It's always this kind of circuitous, stumbling, groping in the dark kind of process of evolving.
I've always been someone who's believed in truth. I believe truth exists. I don't believe in relativism, a 'your truth, my truth' kind of a thing. However, I also believe that the truth must always be spoken in love - and that grace and truth are found in Jesus Christ.
I have always been interested in theater, as an actor and as someone who looks upon theater - at the risk of sounding pretentious - as an icon by which we measure society... My life has been in the theater to an extent. It's only an extension to write, direct, produce, whatever.
The more real things get, the more like myths they become. There have always been myths, but the myths of earlier times were, Im convinced, bad ones, because they made people sick. So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.
I was always interested in myths growing up. So, first I got into some Roman myths, then I was interested in Norse, then Celtic, then I started spreading to all the other mythologies.
My favorite term for a new kind of performance is "security theater." In this genre, we watch as ritualized inspections and patdowns create the illusion of security. It's a form that has become common since 9/11, and even the government agencies that participate in this activity acknowledge,off the record, that it is indeed a species of theater.
I'm not a fan of simulations. Where, 'Oh, we'll go play a simulation of world peace and figure out how to make peace' and then somehow magically that will get translated into the real world. No, that's not the kind of games that I make.
Anyone interested in design must be interested in other fields of expression - theater, ballet, photography, literature, music.
I'm a sort of political person, and I feel that there's a kind of ineradicably political dimension to theater, to all theater, whether it's overtly political or not.
And one has to remember that no photography can pretend to show the truth. A picture only shows a given situation under a very specific perspective, consciously or not, openly or not, relevantly or not. Photographers have to accept they can just convey fragments of illusory realities and relate their own intimate experience of the world. In this process of fictionalising an unreachable truth, it's up to them to impose their doubts about any photographic truth, or accept being impotent pawns in the mediatic game.
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