Between 2008 and 2011, Taryn Simon travelled to research bloodlines and the stories attached to them. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, published by Rizzoli International Publications in 2012, gathers that work into eighteen numbered chapters, I through XVIII. It is not a portfolio of single pictures but an architecture: each chapter holds a sequence of images and text, and the relations between them carry the meaning.

Simon’s subject is inheritance, physical and psychological, set against territory, power, circumstance and religion. She photographed feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, the living dead in India. These are not illustrative anecdotes. The publisher describes the collection as at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood and other components of fate; that tension between system and accident is the book’s real argument.

The chapters were made to be read together. Their order is partly imposed and partly found, and a reader’s sense of pattern accumulates slowly across the sequence of images and accompanying text. Essays by Homi Bhabha and Geoffrey Batchen appear alongside the photographic material and extend the book’s thinking about lineage, evidence and representation.

The project accompanied exhibitions at Tate Modern in London in May 2011, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in September 2011, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York from May to September 2012. For collectors, what matters is less an edition number than the book’s place in Simon’s practice: it is the fullest statement of a four-year inquiry, and a formally deliberate example of how photography can investigate genealogy, testimony and the systems that sort human lives.