From 2008 to this year, Taryn Simon travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. The result of her endeavours is A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, a book and an exhibition open at Tate Modern throughout the Summer.

You might feel a bit let down if you expect to see the kind of large-scale, spectacular photos the artist gave us in An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. I know i was taken aback by these rows of small portraits on a beige background. Most visitors were indeed only scanning the images briefly. On the other hand, we all like a good story and this new body of work certainly provides strong narratives that immerse visitors into the story of feuding families in Brazil, a polygamous Kenyan healer living with his nine wives and 32 children, victims of genocide in Bosnia, South Koreans abducted by North Korean agents, the body double of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, children living in an orphanage in Ukraine, and the reviled descents of 24 European rabbits in Australia.

Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.

Chapter IV follows Latif Yahia who claims to have been the body double of Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein’s son

Gold-plated Iraqi AK-47 seized by the US during a search of Uday Hussein’s palace in Baghdad

Each series comes with a is a textual account of text that narrates the often brutal story of a person. On the left of the text, the surviving people directly linked by blood (the idea of blood being sometimes taken quite figuratively) to that person. On the right, pictures, archive documents bring more context to the story.

1. Yadav, Shivdutt, ~75 (birth date unknown). Sugarcane, wheat, and paddy farmer. Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, India.
2. Yadav, Nageena, ~45 (birth date unknown). Farmer. Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, India

The Living Man Declared Dead is Shivdutt Yadav, a man living in Uttar Pradesh, India. A few years ago, he discovered that official records listed him as dead. And so were his two brothers and their first cousins. Land registry records documented the transfer to other living heirs and allowed them to inherit the farmland.

In Uttar Pradesh, competition for land is rife and record officials are often bribed to declare living people dead in order to redirect the hereditary transfer to new owners. Yadav, his borther and first cousins have been trying to reverse land registry records and be listed as living again. The local court has been scheduling dates for a case review since 2001 but a judge has never appeared.

d. Corpse of a person with leprosy floating in the Ganges River. The dead are cremated on the banks of the river or tied to heavy stones and sunk in the water. Dhanaiy Yadav, Shivdutt Yadav’s father, was cremated along the banks and his ashes were scattered in the river.

Letter to the chief judicial magistrate of Azamgarh demanding official recognition that Shivdutt, Chandrabhan, Phoolchand, and Ram Surat Yadav are living and maintain legal title to their land. Family file, Azamgarh

The rabbits kept inside a Plexiglas cubes are descendants of an original cargo of 24 that travelled from Europe to Australia in 1859 for the pleasure of a man fond of hunting. Within ten years of their introduction, rabbits had become so prevalent that two million could be shot or trapped annually without having any noticeable effect on the population. European rabbits have no natural predators in Australia and their impact on the ecology is devastating. The hunting prey quickly became nothing more than pest that has to be eradicated by all means. The poor creatures are vilified to the point that the Easter bunny has been replaced by the Easter Bilby. Simon went to the Robert Wicks Pest Animal Research Centre in Queensland to photograph the bloodlines of test rabbits. The animals are bread at the lab to test their resistance to the rabbit haemorrhagic disease, a virus used to control rabbit populations.

‘Excerpt from Chapter VI, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters’, 2011

One of the most powerful series exposes the bloodline of Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal legal advisor and governor-general of occupied Poland. Frank crafted and enacted laws and legal doctrines that served the Third Reich’s ideological and territorial ambitions. Under his rule over occupied Poland and Heinrich Himmler’s command of the SS, Polish nationals were conscripted into forced labor in Germany, schools and colleges were closed, academics and intellectuals arrested and the Polish population was starved and a program to exterminate Jews was initiated.

He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and was executed in 1946.

Some of his descendants understandingly refused to be photographed but it’s hard to resist the urge to study the face of the brave ones who accepted to be portrayed. That’s a a heavy legacy they were born to.

Igorot exhibit at the fair (image)

I’ll end with a mention of the chapter about Cabrera Antero, one of the members of the Igorot community put on display at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, to showcase the US’s recent acquisition of the Philippines.

Representatives of the Igorot community were sent to St. Louis where they constructed simulated village for the amusement of the public.

Their exhibit was a huge success among visitors who were intrigued by their custom of eating dogs and for their tattoos. Igorot descendants claim that dogs were eaten mostly on ceremonial occasions, yet the fair organizers compelled them to eat approx. 20 dogs per week. Antero was documented as the only Igorot to speak english. He remained in the country after the fair.

Chapter XVII focuses on children aged between six and 16 living in an orphanage in Ukraine. Orphanage records show that only one child was adopted in a 12-month period

The photo exhibitions that Tate Modern proposes have been one excellent surprise after another. If you have the opportunity to visit the art space, don’t miss the superb Burke + Norfolk: Photographs From The War In Afghanistan nor Photography: New Documentary Forms.

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is at Tate Modern, London, through September 6.

Wallpaper has a slideshow of the exhibition and the book.