A photo-artist's unique show at Tate Modern, London

Tate Modern premieres an important new body of work by the American artist Taryn Simon. ‘A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters’ was produced over a four-year period (2008-11), during which Simon travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories.

In each of the eighteen ‘chapters’ that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.

There are 18 different sets or chapters, and the one that provides the work with its title is Uttar Pradesh based Shivdutt Yadav’s story. A column in The UK Independent by reviewer Laura McLean-Ferris mentions: “Yadav discovered that he and members of his family had been listed as dead and the ownership of their land transferred to other relations.

That they are very much alive has been documented by Simon. Among the images on the footnote panel is something horrific, yet almost beautiful. A body, dead from leprosy floats in the Ganges – the body bleached white, the eyeballs pale and swollen, the face turned black with blood.

Presented in a way reminiscent, aesthetically, of any encyclopedia, our eyes get tempted to skim over these images. Individual scenes leap out, however. The reviewer adds: “There were moments I wished I was looking at these images separately, perhaps on a larger scale. That they are locked together in a frame is, however, a statement from the artist about the complexity of each situation – the people, the images and stories, cannot be separated from one another.”