An Exacting Eye.(Taryn Simon)(Interview)

Byline: EDITOR: ALEXANDRA KOTUR

Photographer Taryn Simon browses a favorite NoHo bookshop for holiday presents, with William Norwich in tow.

Here was the photographer Taryn Simon taking a short break from her lab, where she was working on pictures she had just taken of Senator Barack Obama.

First stop was Dashwood Books on Bond Street. Opened three years ago by David Strettell, former cultural director of Magnum Photos, it is New York City's only independent bookstore devoted exclusively to new, hard-to-find, and out-of-print photography books.

"Books are the best holiday presents," Taryn said, looking for a copy of The Last Picture Show, a compendium of artists who exhibited at the Walker Art Center in 2004 on how experimental use of photography transformed high culture's thoughts about the medium.

Also recommended were Jim Goldberg' s 1985 Rich and Poor (Random House), photographs of people from opposite economic backgrounds ("very relevant this season"), and a volume by Rineke Dijkstra, the Dutch portraitist, simply called Portraits (Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum). Taryn's own books were not on her list, but they should be on yours: The Innocents (Umbrage Editions), images of people wrongly convicted of crimes and imprisoned before proving their innocence, and An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (Steidl). A selection from the latter was exhibited at the Whitney Museum last year, recently finished at Gagosian Gallery in L.A. and at the Gwangju Biennale in Korea, and can be seen as part of the group show "Reality Check" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Next stop was a cup of tea at ThA[c] AdorA[c], on East Thirteenth Street. Although Taryn's artwork involves meticulous setup and aesthetics, using a 4A5 large-format camerafilm, not digitalthe Obama story, for the New York Times Magazine, was captured over the course of one day as he campaigned in Pennsylvania. A moment at Penny's Flowers in Glenside was particularly memorable. The senator was buying flowers to take home to his wife that night, the Obamas' sixteenth wedding anniversary.