2008 Infinity Award: Publication

With a foreword by Salman Rushdie, the photographs in An American Index (Steidl, 2007), which were exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2007, serve as an inventory of spaces that function at the heart of American culture but lie hidden and out-of-view. Simon's varied subject matter in this series, gathered from the realms of government, medicine, entertainment, science, religion, national security, and nature, ranges from radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility to a portrait of a selectively inbred white tiger. Carefully documenting provocative and controversial subjects, she makes use of the annotated photograph's power to engage and inform us, employing a direct and unsentimental approach that brings these strange and often inaccessible aspects of American life into the light of day.