A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I – XVIII is a photographic series by artist Taryn Simon that was executed in a four-year period (2008–2011), during which Simon travelled across the world tracing and researching different bloodlines. The series comprises 18 "chapters" that document individual bloodlines. The chapters are investigations of fate, blood, psychological inheritance and what the artist refers to as "a relentless persistence of birth and death, and an endless collection of stories in between."

Each "chapter" has three parts: image, text, and footnotes. The first part is composed of a rigorous system of images in which the subject, their ascendants, and descendants are photographed after being interviewed on a plain, off-white background, stripped from any cultural context. The images are then placed in rows alongside one another in a chronological order to represent the bloodline. Some of the subjects were not able to attend the shoot because of military service, dengue fever, a conflicting event, and women not being able to be photographed for religious or cultural reasons. In these cases, Simon leaves the space blank to represent a "gap" in the bloodline. The second part is the text, a panel composed of Simon's research about the bloodline she is documenting. The final part is what Simon calls "footnotes". Unlike the first part, these images do not have an orderly system of representation, and are presented in a more rhizomatic structure with the intention of representing information similarly to how it would be obtained in the digital age. The work incorporates elements of photography, text, design, and sculpture.

A Living Man Declared Dead And Other Chapters, I – XVIII was exhibited in Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany (2011), Tate Modern in London, England (2011), The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California (2012), Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (2012), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2013), The Pavillion Downtown, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2013), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2013), and , Cherbourg, France (2015).

The title of the exhibition A Living Man Declared Dead is derived from Chapter I, in which Simon documents the bloodline of Shivdutt Yadav. Yadav, his two brothers, and his cousin were declared dead by state officials in Uttar Pradesh, India. The documents are a result of bribery in which city officials accept money in exchange for official death documents that result in the inheritance of hereditary land.

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