by Zoe Pollock
Taryn Simon photographs what people don't declare:
One result of that relentless documentation of seizures was an unexpected awareness of the overwhelming volume of black-market and counterfeit goods that are removed from economic circulation. The threat to the original implied by these products was interesting for me as a photographer, because photography is making a copy of something seemingly original or real, and here I was taking copies of copies. The objects couldn’t cross custom’s border, but the photographs couldand they could become commodities in another economy.
(Image: Handbags, from the Contraband project, by Taryn Simon)