From Bond girls to plutonium rods, Taryn Simon has photographed all things 007 to scrutinise how the blockbuster franchise taps into our fears and fantasies
As any 007 obsessive will tell you, before there was James Bond, secret agent, there was James Bond, ornithologist. When keen bird-watcher Ian Fleming, who lived on a colonial-style estate in Jamaica, was trawling around for a suitable name – "brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon, and yet very masculine"– for his fictional hero, he settled on the author of one of his favourite non-fiction works, Birds of the West Indies. Published in 1936 by the other James Bond, it detailed the 400-plus bird species on the islands and soon became a classic work of reference.
Sixty years after the first appearance of Fleming's James Bond, photographer Taryn Simon has created a visual taxonomy of all things 007 – Bond girls, gadgets, cars, weapons – but taken Birds of the West Indies, by the other James Bond, as her title. It is a characteristically ambitious undertaking, but, like Simon's previous work, A Living Man Pronounced Dead, it left me wondering if the idea outweighed the end result.
There are two interrelated ideas here. The first is the creation of a taxonomy of the entire James Bond brand based on the original bird-watching book, which seems a slightly awkward, odd conceit in itself. The second is the series of portraits of Bond girls, which is essentially a meditation on glamour and ageing and, as such, works pretty well. But for me, the two sit together uncomfortably, even though I accept the suggestion that Bond girls are fetishised by a mostly male audience as much as the fast cars and the gadgets.
Simon has chosen to photograph the Bond girls – though the word hardly applies to most of the women here – in clothes and poses of their own choice against a white background. Sophie Marceau, who played Electra King in The World Is Not Enough, stands in a see-through blouse with her long skirt held above her knees as if she is about to remove her knickers. One hopes this is irony writ large. It certainly gets to the nub of James Bond's reputation as the ultimate ladykiller. Tsai Chin appears twice in the same clothes and pose, having played Ling in 1967's You Only Live Twice and Madame Wu in the 2006 version of Casino Royale. Maud Adams (Octopussy in the 1983 film) looks matter-of-fact in a simple purple dress, while Grace Jones seems to have borrowed one of Bond's dinner jackets, which, throwing age and caution to the wind, she wears with nothing else but high heels. Kim Basinger (Domino Petachi in 1983's Never Say Never Again) does not appear at all. (There are plain black pages for individual women who refused Simon's request to be photographed, a motif she also used in her previous series.)
Corine Cléry (Corine Dufour in 1979's Moonraker) has perhaps the strongest portrait, because it is the most defiant: she wears tight black trousers and high heels, her arms folded beneath her bare breasts. The look on her face says take me as I am or piss off. It is the older women who intrigue, not least because they mostly opt for Bond-style glamour or its very opposite. And yet, they all seem somewhat defined by the generic roles they played in the Bond films.
Yet the portraits appear almost as punctuation marks to the bigger series, in which Simon photographs objects linked to the Bond franchise. The atmosphere of this visual inventory is much more ominous and recalls Simon's previous book, Contraband, which featured all the items impounded by customs over a four-day period at New York's JFK airport. The guns look like real guns, likewise the knives, garottes, detonators, limpet mines and the plutonium rod and case. Whatever else the Bond movies do, for better or worse, they certainly keep abreast of our collective anxieties. There are echoes here too of Simon's most well-known series, An American Index of the Hidden and Familiar, in which she gained access to places the public seldom see: a nuclear waste storage facility in Washington State, a lab where deadly diseases are studied, an outdoor cage where prisoners can exercise before they are executed.
Birds of the West Indies asks why the Bond formula continues to work on our fantasies and desires in the same way it did in the 1960s, when the first films were made, and in 1953, when Fleming debuted his character in the novel Casino Royale. The book makes the implicit link between the allure of the Bond girls and the fetishisation of the fast cars, gadgets and hi-tech weapons. But it also lays bare that process of objectification by the detached, almost scientific approach Simon applies. On this level, it adheres to the model of the original Birds of the West Indies, right down to the cover, but, to me, the metaphor is stretched. What nags at me is the feeling that the approach used by James Bond, ornithologist, was perhaps not the best model for decoding James Bond, blockbuster franchise. But Birds of the West Indies, as with all Simon's work, manages to intrigue even as it baffles. Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.
As any 007 obsessive will tell you, before there was James Bond, secret agent, there was James Bond, ornithologist. When keen bird-watcher Ian Fleming, who lived on a colonial-style estate in Jamaica, was trawling around for a suitable name – "brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon, and yet very masculine"– for his fictional hero, he settled on the author of one of his favourite non-fiction works, Birds of the West Indies. Published in 1936 by the other James Bond, it detailed the 400-plus bird species on the islands and soon became a classic work of reference.
Sixty years after the first appearance of Fleming's James Bond, photographer Taryn Simon has created a visual taxonomy of all things 007 – Bond girls, gadgets, cars, weapons – but taken Birds of the West Indies, by the other James Bond, as her title. It is a characteristically ambitious undertaking, but, like Simon's previous work, A Living Man Pronounced Dead, it left me wondering if the idea outweighed the end result.
There are two interrelated ideas here. The first is the creation of a taxonomy of the entire James Bond brand based on the original bird-watching book, which seems a slightly awkward, odd conceit in itself. The second is the series of portraits of Bond girls, which is essentially a meditation on glamour and ageing and, as such, works pretty well. But for me, the two sit together uncomfortably, even though I accept the suggestion that Bond girls are fetishised by a mostly male audience as much as the fast cars and the gadgets.
Simon has chosen to photograph the Bond girls – though the word hardly applies to most of the women here – in clothes and poses of their own choice against a white background. Sophie Marceau, who played Electra King in The World Is Not Enough, stands in a see-through blouse with her long skirt held above her knees as if she is about to remove her knickers. One hopes this is irony writ large. It certainly gets to the nub of James Bond's reputation as the ultimate ladykiller. Tsai Chin appears twice in the same clothes and pose, having played Ling in 1967's You Only Live Twice and Madame Wu in the 2006 version of Casino Royale. Maud Adams (Octopussy in the 1983 film) looks matter-of-fact in a simple purple dress, while Grace Jones seems to have borrowed one of Bond's dinner jackets, which, throwing age and caution to the wind, she wears with nothing else but high heels. Kim Basinger (Domino Petachi in 1983's Never Say Never Again) does not appear at all. (There are plain black pages for individual women who refused Simon's request to be photographed, a motif she also used in her previous series.)
Corine Cléry (Corine Dufour in 1979's Moonraker) has perhaps the strongest portrait, because it is the most defiant: she wears tight black trousers and high heels, her arms folded beneath her bare breasts. The look on her face says take me as I am or piss off. It is the older women who intrigue, not least because they mostly opt for Bond-style glamour or its very opposite. And yet, they all seem somewhat defined by the generic roles they played in the Bond films.
Yet the portraits appear almost as punctuation marks to the bigger series, in which Simon photographs objects linked to the Bond franchise. The atmosphere of this visual inventory is much more ominous and recalls Simon's previous book, Contraband, which featured all the items impounded by customs over a four-day period at New York's JFK airport. The guns look like real guns, likewise the knives, garottes, detonators, limpet mines and the plutonium rod and case. Whatever else the Bond movies do, for better or worse, they certainly keep abreast of our collective anxieties. There are echoes here too of Simon's most well-known series, An American Index of the Hidden and Familiar, in which she gained access to places the public seldom see: a nuclear waste storage facility in Washington State, a lab where deadly diseases are studied, an outdoor cage where prisoners can exercise before they are executed.
Birds of the West Indies asks why the Bond formula continues to work on our fantasies and desires in the same way it did in the 1960s, when the first films were made, and in 1953, when Fleming debuted his character in the novel Casino Royale. The book makes the implicit link between the allure of the Bond girls and the fetishisation of the fast cars, gadgets and hi-tech weapons. But it also lays bare that process of objectification by the detached, almost scientific approach Simon applies. On this level, it adheres to the model of the original Birds of the West Indies, right down to the cover, but, to me, the metaphor is stretched. What nags at me is the feeling that the approach used by James Bond, ornithologist, was perhaps not the best model for decoding James Bond, blockbuster franchise. But Birds of the West Indies, as with all Simon's work, manages to intrigue even as it baffles. Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.