An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar

An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar gathers Taryn Simon's photographs of places in the United States that the public rarely sees, among them a cryonics vault, a nuclear waste storage pool and the art hung in the CIA's original headquarters.

Her sites come from science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security and religion. She shot with a large-format view camera wherever cameras were allowed, and each picture has a written note on its subject. The book includes a cryopreservation unit at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, cesium and strontium capsules in a pool at the Hanford Site in Washington State, and a revolver frame at Smith & Wesson headquarters in Springfield, Massachusetts. Every subject is legal, and the project is about the divide between those who get access and those who do not. It was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2007.

Steidl published the first edition in February 2007 as a clothbound hardback of 152 pages with 70 colour plates, a foreword by Salman Rushdie and Althea Wasow as editor.

Simon was born in New York in 1975, graduated from Brown University and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Her earlier project The Innocents opened at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. It documents cases of wrongful conviction in the United States and looks at the part photography played in them.