Taryn Simon’s Father Country I Do Love You

Father Country I Do Love You sounds like a doozy of a new exhibition from photographer Taryn Simon. The project focuses on the life and work of an unnamed, retired FBI agent. From the NY Times: She Spent Years on a Giant Project About One Man. The Result Is Monumental.

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?

The piece describes the project, which includes over 1000 photographs and other material, as “a Great American Novel in visual form” and “huge and fractal: biography as butterfly effect”, which sounds fascinating.

Even Jodie Foster makes an appearance; this particular agent had trained Foster at the FBI Academy in Quantico as preparation for her role as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.

Father Country I Do Love You debuts at the Guggenheim in NYC on September 18 and runs through March 14, 2027.

• art
• Guggenheim Museum
• Jodie Foster
• museums
• photography
• Taryn Simon