Michael Stipe with Taryn Simon: Portraits of Now | LIVE from NYPL

The artist and former R.E.M. frontman discusses his new book of photography, an exploration of contemporary portraiture. For event details and more, visit www.nypl.org/events/programs/...
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Michael Stipe recently published his fourth book of photography, Even the birds gave pause, which, he says, sets out “to explore what the portrait means in this century.” It features a series of works-in-progress in plaster, concrete, rotocast plastics, ceramics, bookmaking, and darkroom photographic printing. “We are constantly bombarded with documentation and imagery through digital technology and social media culture,” Stipe said. “Media has collapsed into exploitation and sensation, entertainment, and with that a confusion about image. So, what is the job of the portraitist or photographer in this moment?”
Stipe takes the stage at LIVE from NYPL with artist Taryn Simon to talk about this question and share images from his latest book.
Presented as The Richard B. Salomon Distinguished Lecture.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Michael Stipe, American, born 1960, is an artist, producer, and singer/songwriter. He fronted the band R.E.M. for 31 years, selling over 100 million records and touring the world. As film producer he made over 25 feature films, including Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich, Jim McKay’s En El Séptimo Día, Chris Smith’s American Movie, and Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine. For the past decade his personal focus has been cross-medium work, incorporating video, soundscape, sculpture, and photographic and digital imagery. Recent photobooks include Volume 1 (with Jonathan Berger, 2018), Our Interference Times: A Visual Record (with Douglas Coupland, 2019) a third volume of portraits (2021), and the current Even the Birds Gave Pause (2023), all released through Damiani out of Bologna, Italy. His first institution show was at ICA Milan in December 2023. He is currently completing his first solo album to be released this year. Michael lives in New York City and Berlin.
Taryn Simon directs our attention to the unseen forces shaping the worlds we inhabit. Her projects, using photography, sculpture, text, sound and performance, center on storytelling, secrecy, and the hidden contours of power and authority.
Her multi-year projects are informed by research with varied institutions such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the International Commission on Missing Persons, the Fine Arts Commission of the CIA, Playboy Enterprises, and The New York Public Library, which recently exhibited The Color of a Flea’s Eyes, her photographic works dissecting its treasured Picture Collection.
Some of Simon’s other exhibitions and books include The Innocents, documenting the stories of individuals who served time in American prisons for violent crimes they did not commit; An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, examining the divide between public and expert access through hidden and unknown objects and sites in the United States; A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, mapping chance and other components of fate in bloodlines throughout the world, Paperwork and the Will of Capital, unraveling the stagecraft of power and the broken promises it yields, and An Occupation of Loss in which professional mourners enact rituals of grief, simultaneously broadcasting their lamentations from within a sculptural installation.
Her work is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Cisternerne in Denmark, and in the collections of the Guggenheim, New York; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.
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