(Via We Make Money Not Art)

Taryn Simon makes pictures of the mundane things that turn out to be — or to represent — things that are damn important. The pictures in her new work An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar are like a catalog of the weird stuff you always new existed somewhere, but had never actually seen. In the first few documented on her website, you see a cryogenic freezing device, an inbred white tiger, a group of radioactive bars in storage, a Braille edition of Playboy, and the US Customs contraband room at JFK airport in New York City, which seems to be filled almost entirely with cheerfully decomposing fruit. The one after that is the legendary room where the Feds actually grow pot in Oxford Mississippi. I’ve included those two below.