Photographing Bloodlines

American photographer and Guggenheim fellow Taryn Simon captures the essence of different generation-spanning stories by photographing the descendants of those at the center of the tale. Dividing her work into chapters, Simon attempts to relate these unique stories and decipher how much of their fate was determined by genealogy and how much of it was a product of the interplay of different forces.

In this Taryn Simon keynote presentation, she presents many of the fascinating and widely varied stories from all over the world which she has documented through portraits, photographs of evidence from their story and a framed written description of the story. This highly intellectual project provides a unique window into the lives of families and bloodlines from all over the world, which she says are just as coded as blood itself.