Contraband

Contraband records what customs officers took from travelers and the mail at John F. Kennedy International Airport, photographed by Taryn Simon over five days in November 2009.

Simon lived at the airport from 16 to 20 November 2009 and photographed around the clock at two sites, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the U.S. Postal Service International Mail Facility. The items had been detained or seized from arriving passengers and from express mail: counterfeit American Express travelers checks, Cuban cigars, khat, a dead hawk and an ostrich egg among them. Her website counts 1,075 photographs in the work. In the exhibited version the photographs are grouped by kind, and each group is titled with the item and its legal status, as in "Cigarettes & Tobacco (Abandoned/Illegal/Prohibited)".

Steidl co-published the first edition with Gagosian Gallery in September 2010 as an English-language softcover. Hans Ulrich Obrist contributed a text.

Simon's website records Contraband in installation at Lever House in New York, the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. Steidl lists her work in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Centre Pompidou.