The New York pho­tog­ra­pher Taryn Simon shows the unknown and furtive of Amer­i­can soci­ety. At first glance with an incred­i­ble beauty it turns to a prick­ling scari­ness when under­stand­ing the con­tent. Her first pop­u­lar piece of art is about the Body Farm: a foren­sic insti­tu­tion in Ten­nessee which ana­lyzes the decay of human bodies for the pur­pose of crim­i­nal research. One of her pic­ture shows a dead body lying in scrub, hidden in the dark­ness. The boy is still wear­ing sneak­ers with legs which look burnt. With this series she pro­voked a lot of protest and the insti­tute is now strongly observed.

She attempts to access the most secret rooms, land­scapes, lab­o­ra­to­ries, dumps or archives in Amer­ica. Simon suc­ceeded even to enter the Nuclear Waste Encap­su­la­tion and Stor­age Facil­ity in Han­ford (Wash­ing­ton) which pre­serves 1936 steel cap­sules of atomic waste with 120 mil­lion Curie of radioac­tiv­ity in total. The cold glow of the rays is over­pow­er­ing even within the steel cap­sules, which are sev­eral meters thick. There is prob­a­bly no other place in Amer­ica which is more pol­luted. As Simon writes, the core of the project is the “total detach­ment of expert knowl­edge and offi­cial publicity.”