Taryn Simon’s Most Ambitious Work Yet Began With One Mysterious Man

Imagine looking back on someone’s life as though it were a physical path winding through time and space. How might one begin to comprehend such an overwhelming picture, with its many crossings, deflections, and infinite ripples of influence? In “Father Country I Do Love You,” Taryn Simon’s thrilling, momentous new Guggenheim show, presented with the support of Bottega Veneta, Simon illuminates the biography of a real, now-retired FBI agent through 42 chapters staged along the museum’s spiraling ramp. Each is based on a story the agent has shared with her over the past near-decade, while also unearthing the fates of people whose lives have been directly or peripherally impacted by his cases and actions in the field.

“In many ways he stands in for all of us,” says the 51-year-old artist of this figure, whose identity remains a secret—though the work comes very near to revealing it at times, even featuring his elderly parents. “He represents a middleman, someone who enacts a lot and touches so much without access to the entire picture.” For each of his stories, Simon devised an original photographic series, aimed at resurfacing some of the countless narrative threads that extend from the agent’s own. These tales, and the ones that extend upon it, become all the more resonant for their direct connection to dozens of events marking pivotal moments in the recent history of the United States with which the agent was involved—from D.C. mayor Marion Barry’s cocaine bust in 1990 and other sagas from the War on Drugs, to post-9/11 counterterrorism efforts, to investigations of murders and suicides of government employees. “The matrix of [the project’s] constellation was something felt, but impossible to convey until this final moment of realizing its physical self,” says Simon.

Simon first learned of the agent’s existence after spotting his name on an evidence receipt in the midst of research. An artist whose evocative, meticulously executed photographic works arise from deep dives into under-the-radar truths and histories, Simon followed her curiosity. After making contact, she met with the agent for the first time at a Mexican restaurant on November 14, 2017, in his current state of Maryland. That sparked years of subsequent dialogue—which gradually crystallized into discrete starting points for Simon’s inquiries.

The agent was there for the 1994 arrest of Aldrich Ames, who was sentenced to life for espionage; Simon tracked down Ames’s now-adult son, Paul, who was 5 years old during the FBI raid. The agents allowed him to take a suitcase of his own belongings while seizing the rest of the family’s possessions, which, per protocol, were ultimately sent to auction. Simon’s portraits of Paul hang in the show alongside various examples of high-end items the government confiscated under other circumstances. In response to the agent’s account of tracking down the D.C. snipers in 2002, Simon contacted one of them, Lee Boyd Malvo, who had been 17 at the time and was sentenced to multiple life sentences, although it’s believed he was groomed by the other sniper (who has been executed). The artist mailed Malvo original photographs of things he’s told the press that he misses from his childhood in Jamaica, like sunsets and fruit. Malvo, who as a prisoner, is only allowed to have black-and-white Xeroxes of letters and photos sent to him, mailed back the Xeroxes to Simon, along with poems and drawings—material now presented at the Guggenheim.

After his retirement from the FBI, the agent describes taking a job as a school security officer, during which time he had kept a Superman cape in his office and a similar robe at home. Meanwhile, his girlfriend gathered up all of his T-shirts from over his career and turned them into a quilt, which he sleeps under every night. Here Simon’s documentation veers back to the specific and personal to this figure: with one photograph capturing a robe emblazoned with the Superman logo fluttering midair, as well as the quilt, blaring with signage from “FBI Evidence Response Team” to “Manchester Police,” harkening back to his start as a police officer in New Hampshire.

“In the project there’s an inseparable rub between the complexities of the big events on the agent's timeline and the everyday movements, fantasies and necessities of a life,” says Simon. At the same time, as Simon’s artistic intervention made her a character in this web, the artist drew a connection to her own father, who also worked for the U.S. Government before pivoting to manufacturing arcade games and pool tables. Nodding to this personal history, visitors who reach the top of the Guggenheim can release a billiard-like ball down a teak track that runs down to the bottom of the rotunda—although a ball’s exact path is up to chance: “A single act of participation and touch unfolds in ways that can’t be calculated,” says Simon. Elsewhere appear images of her father’s hand holding some of the thousands of Kodachrome slides he took throughout his life, documenting moments from both professional adventures and family memories. In this way the lines between artist and subject, father and agent, begin to grow fuzzy—perhaps reflecting the strange nature of memory when lived experiences straddle the individual and collective.

“Father Country I Do Love You,” which is on view through March 14, 2027, is also the Guggenheim’s first solo exhibition in its main space of an artist working primarily in photography, and the most expansive-ever single debut of new work from any artist. The spiraling pathway up and down the iconic rotunda certainly makes an ideal layout for the dizzying succession of chapters, where everything is visible at once—but demands slow contemplation to be understood.