Summary
Cataloguing the confiscated contents of the US Customs and Border Protection contraband room at John F Kennedy Airport, Simon offers up a kind of surrealist fugue, an ode to forbidden fruit (and meat) that outdoes even her cornucopia of an image: "African cane rats infested with maggots," she sings, "African yams (Dioscorea), Andean potatoes, Bangladeshi cucurbit plants, bushmeat, cherimoya fruit, curry leaves (Murraya), dried orange peels, fresh eggs, giant African snails, impala skullcap, jackfruit seeds, June plums, kola nuts, mangoes, okras, passion fruit, pig nose, pig mouths, pork, raw poultry (chicken), South American pig head, South American tree tomatoes, south Asian lime infected with citrus canker, sugar cane (Poaceae), uncooked meats, unidentified subtropical plant in soil." There are images of deep humanity, such as the portrait of Don James, a terminal cancer patient, taken just after he received a prescription for a lethal dose of pentobarbital, for which he had successfully fought under Oregon's Death With Dignity Act.
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Hidden Worlds
"Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things," the poet Robert Browning wrote in "Bishop Blougram's Apology" (1855). It is a line that has inspired writers from Graham Greene, who said in his 1971 memoir, A Sort of Life, that it could serve as an epigraph to all his novels, to Orhan Pamuk, who sets it at the beginning of his novel Snow. It could equally well serve as an introduction to the photography of a woman whose aesthetic is one of stretching the limits of what we are allowed to see and know, of going to the ambiguous boundaries where dangers - physical, int...
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