Taryn Simon photographs secret sites

http://www.ted.com Taryn Simon exhibits her startling take on photography -- to reveal worlds and people we would never see otherwise. She shares two projects: one documents otherworldly locations typically kept secret from the public, the other involves haunting portraits of men convicted for crimes they did not commit.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Watch a highlight reel of the Top 10 TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

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[LochanaMusic]

she's pretty

[TheBigCollapse]

No implication at all, it's a fact: children often cannot tell the difference between reality and dreams, and we take their tesitmony in a court of law? So you are implying that a person can give testimony without accountability?

I don't think a child should be treated as an adult if they kill someone, nor do I think they should be taken as an adult in a court of law.

[crudhousefull]

Love this lady

[crudhousefull]

Her beauty really disrupts my concentration. She should try to get someone worse looking to do the speaking

[crudhousefull]

@TheBigCollapse Sure...if some kids are raped by some paedophile and there are only kids to testify the paedophile should go free. The weight of the kids testimony might be accepted as lighter than that of an adult...but ignoring kids' testimony because they might also believe dreams seems a little extreme. Adults are prone to hallucinations in adverse conditions...should they also be excluded from courts of law?

[Geo877]

@ndyt not right indeed.

[roboshea]

WHAT A SMART AND TALENTED WOMAN XX

[jtyr71]

A big part of the work that is absent in this context is text. So I create these two poles. Every image is accompanied with a very detailed, factual text. What I ‘m most interested in is the invisible space between a text and its accompanying image and how the image is transformed by the text and the text by the image. So at best the image is meant to float away into abstraction, and multiple truths, and fantasy. And then the text functions as this cruel anchor that nails it to the ground.

[jtyr71]

I wanted to see the center with my own eyes, but what I came away with is a photograph, and its just another place to observe and the understanding that there are no absolute, all-knowing insiders, and the outsider can never really reach the core.

[jtyr71]

I transcribed some key quotes:

Photography threatens fantasy. They didn’t want to let my camera in because it confronts constructed realities, myths, and beliefs and provides what appears to be evidence of a truth, but there are multiple truths attached to every image, depending on the creator’s intention, the viewer, and the context in which it is presented.