In “Contraband” (2010), Taryn Simon "embedded with U.S. Customs and Border Protection at Kennedy Airport for five straight days photographing more than a thousand confiscated items, including alcohol, a goatskin drum, counterfeit Louis Vuitton handbags and 'unidentified meat.' She presented these objects in an alphabetical index, revealing the government’s attempt to regulate the folk beliefs, greed, perversion and just plain strangeness that human beings bring with them wherever they travel. But the objects are also simply themselves: gross or beautiful, banal or precious. Flecks of human striving, pulled from the bureaucratic conveyor belt, given their due."