NYT: For years, [Taryn] Simon, a photographer whose practice stands at the intersection of journalism and conceptual art, had been working on a project about the life of a single retired F.B.I. agent. She encountered his name by happenstance in 2017, and since then had been in an ongoing conversation with him, trying to understand everything she could about his career.
As it turned out, his work had touched many catastrophes of American life — the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, for example, which the agent helped to inspect, or the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11, when the agent was in charge of sifting debris in the immediate aftermath — and also lesser-known events, historical footnotes that were nonetheless telling. What interested Simon were not just the events themselves, but also their reverberations, far beyond any immediate blast radius. What happened, for instance, to the physical ruins from the TWA crash? What became of the woman who tried to take a photograph of the smoldering Pentagon, whose film the F.B.I. agent had confiscated? Or to the Iraqi diplomat who ran the country’s U.S. embassy during the Persian Gulf war, whom the agent had monitored? Or to the child of a couple accused of being Russian spies, whose house the agent had raided?
She hoped to make an artwork out of the pursuit of these questions, and like many of the projects Simon had done in her career, this would require applying her imagination to a hyper-rigorous investigative process. She followed dozens of story lines connected to the agent’s work and found people who had been affected by shootings, spying, political back-stabbing and surveillance — directly or indirectly, suffering or benefiting. She would then research the details of their lives, and it was often one of those details that led her to the photographs she would eventually make: in kitchens, in weapons depots, on mountains, in forests, in summer camps, in med spas, in people’s homes; in Kenya, Russia, Israel, Greece and all over the United States.
The project became huge and fractal: biography as butterfly effect. On one level it was the story of one man’s life; on another it was a wild alternative history of the American security state, and the thousands of people, institutions, animals and objects caught in its net."