Photoeye Book of the Week: Taryn Simon’s Birds of the West Indies
The recent Bond films have expunged all of the camp and humor from a franchise that previously featured names like Pussy Galore, a weaponized Bowler hat, and a crocodile shaped mini-sub. These, and every other Bond vehicle, weapon, and woman are cataloged in Taryn Simon’s index Birds of the West Indies. The only iconic thing missing is martinis, but those remain the same film after film – shaken not stirred. This index, however, is very much shaken and stirred (by the Mersenne Twister random number generator) to emphasize how interchangeable each of these elements is within the films’ plotlines.
The book takes its form from ornithologist James Bond’s (for whom avid birdwatcher Ian Fleming named the super-spy) book of the same title. Rather than tropical birds, however, Simon presents a typology of the super-spy’s accessories from all of the Bond films to date. Any ostentatious items are tempered by Simon’s taxonomic form, though some of these Bond birds remain as flamboyant as anything his namesake may have observed on islands in the Caribbean Basin. Weapons and vehicles are timeless props displayed against black, while the women are photographed, aged into the present, against a cream background that separates them from the other artifacts, cracking the veneer of their narrative objectification. A number of actresses refused to participate. Labels and black boxes hold their place.
The book closes with a list of the birds from Bond’s 1937 guide, stripped of information and illustrations. Common and scientific names are only amended with a notation for their migratory habit. They are reduced to a minimal status emphasizing only their freedom of movement from one place to another, just as a 1971 Ford Mustang in Diamonds Are Forever can be a 1962 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud in A View to a Kill.