Birds of the West Indies

Taryn Simon's Birds of the West Indies traces the accidental origin of the name James Bond. Not the fictional spy, but the real ornithologist whose 1936 field guide of the same title Ian Fleming borrowed for his own creation.

Simon builds the book around three parallel sequences. One is portraits of the actresses who played "Bond girls" across the film franchise. Another catalogues code names the U.S. government has assigned to weapons systems and covert operations, many of them, coincidentally or not, also bird names. The third reproduces the original bird plates from the ornithologist James Bond's field guide. Read together, the sequences trace how a naming system meant to catalogue Caribbean bird species migrated into espionage fiction, then into the actual vocabulary of American military and intelligence programs. Hatje Cantz published the 440-page clothbound volume in 2013, with a contribution from curator Daniel Baumann. The project began as a companion video work shown at the Venice Biennale that year.

Simon was born in New York in 1975. She works across photography, text, and archival research to expose the systems, official and hidden, that structure how the state names, classifies, and remembers. Her other projects include An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar and A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII. Birds of the West Indies extends that method to the language of naming itself.