Rear Views, a Star-forming Nebula, and the Office of Foreign Propaganda

Rear Views, a Star-Forming Nebula, and the Office of Foreign Propaganda is a large survey of the photographic projects Taryn Simon made from 2002 onward, published by Tate Publishing in 2015.

Simon’s website lists texts by Simon Baker, Salman Rushdie, Homi K. Bhabha, Daniel Baumann, Tim Griffin, Tina Kuklieski, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Elisabeth Sussman. The hardcover has 388 pages and 200 color plates. The same site records an installation of the same title at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2015.

Setanta Books, which lists the book, sorts Simon’s work into three groups: projects on the workings of American law (The Innocents, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar and Contraband), A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII, a four-year study on a global scale of politics, history and individual agency, and projects drawn from little-known archives and stories (Black Square and The Picture Collection). Setanta also says that Simon builds her work from photography, text and graphic design in equal measure.