Photo By Taryn Simon

Irvin Fain served 18 years of a death sentence for kidnapping, rape and murder he did not commit. He was photographed in 2002 near Idaho's Snake River

A few days before Taryn Simon's The Innocents opened at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), I asked an acquaintance of mine, a photographer, what he thought of the exhibition when saw it at New York City's PS1, where it originated. He said, rather instinctively, "How could a show like that fail?"

His point was well taken. The concept behind Simon's photographs -- posing the men (and only men) in sites that, according to Simon, "came to assume a particular significance following (the man's) wrongful conviction: the scene of misidentification, the scene of the arrest, the alibi location, or the scene of the crime" -- at first seems obvious and entirely political, and political in such a way as to which no one could raise an objection. These men, Simon's subjects, were innocent and yet jailed for years. Juries deemed them guilty without basis; victims identified them as their attackers without being entirely certain. The men were only able to leave prison after DNA evidence surfaced, at last proving their innocence.

I had to wait to see the photographs themselves before I could reply. What I thought I would find at the CAC was indeed what I found -- several large, clear, focused photographs, each with a gaze or a mirror that wants to implicate the viewer as well as the justice system. What I wasn't prepared for, and what makes the exhibition valuable, is that Simon's photographs do not only seek to blame, to show and to explain; they also critically examine their own medium -- photography.

These men suffered the effects of mistaken identity -- some from a police lineup, but most from photographs, photographs passed to the victims with the expectation of a positive ID. It didn't matter how many people could alibi Frederick Daye (11): It mattered only that one person, the victim, said, "You are all wrong; he is my attacker."

Now, obviously, the victims know that their IDs were erroneous. Whom do they blame? An excerpt from Jennifer Thompson's statement after her "attacker's" exoneration gives us a mess of information. She says, "I was asked to come down and look at the photo array of different men. I picked Ron's photo because in my mind it most closely resembled the man who attacked me. But really what happened was that, because I had made a composite sketch, he actually most closely resembled my sketch as opposed to the actual attacker. All the images became enmeshed to one image and that became Ron, and Ron became my attacker."

It's not surprising that Simon uses Thompson's report as an epigraph to her own artist's statement. Because, really, Simon is not just photographing the innocent and setting up an exhibition that cannot fail, she is also questioning the legitimacy of blame and visual identification. As such, she questions the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system.

Simon's project began as a photo-documentary for The New York Times Magazine in 2000, when DNA began exonerating many "murderers," "rapists" and "thieves." The photos compelled Simon to further her research, interviewing the exonerated across the United States. She found that most all of her subjects had been wrongfully imprisoned because of mistaken identification. As Simon says, "Photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens onto criminals, assisted officers in obtaining erroneous eyewitness identifications, and aided prosecutors in securing convictions. The criminal justice system had failed to recognize the limitations of relying on photographic images."

As such, Simon has brought to the forefront the problem that photographic scholars -- like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes -- have long questioned. Because the camera is a mechanical device, we are conditioned to believe that it is a flawless system of seeing -- more reliable than our own eyes. And yet, there is so much manipulation involved in taking a photograph. First, there is a subjective human standing behind the camera, trying to capture not truth exactly, but a specific version of that truth. ("Oh wait," I hear my best friend saying before I snap her photo. "Let me give you my good side.")

Second, there are systems of seeing, ways of reading a photograph that is as complicated as reading the Op-Ed columns. We all have opinions. We will all read into the image (or the text) what we want. In the end, even the immaculate photograph is smudged with preconceptions.

So while Simon's pictures themselves are more or less what I expected -- images of men standing alone or with family -- gazing point blank into the camera with the sad and trapped eyes of a person wronged -- the ideology behind them is something special. Moreover, the photographic legitimacy question that Simon poses is implied in many of these images. In several, such as "Walter (Tony) Snyder," "Hector Gonzoles" and "Frederick Daye," mirrors both distort and deflect truth, as they do in real space. You'll find reflective waters in "Jeffery Pierce" and "Troy Webb," shadows in "Kevin Byrd," and a somnambulistic, dreamlike sense in many others.

All these characteristics -- mirrors, shadows, reflections and illusory settings -- are optical illusions. They let us see what isn't actually there. In this way, Simon's photographs carefully and thoughtfully pull us into the legitimacy problem. Now I can answer my acquaintance's question. This exhibition could fail, and miserably so, if it were as simplistic as it first sounds. Rather, The Innocents succeeds, quite simply, because it is ponderous.

Simon has said, "Photographing the wrongfully convicted ... brings to the surface the attenuated relationship between truth and fiction, and efficiency and injustice," as does analyzing any photograph. Grade: A