New York photographer Taryn Simon is the name on everyone's lips these days.

She's got shows running right now at London's Tate Modern and Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie (that exhibition heads next to New York's MoMA) and this past summer, she was included in the Venice Biennale.

Simon's also got an exhibition hanging at Milwaukee Art Museum right now.

But the show here is different, says MAM curator of photographs Lisa Hostetler, who provided the seed for "Taryn Simon: Photographs and Texts." The show travels to Moscow and Helsinki after it closes here on New Year's Day 2012.

Simon's current exhibitions, outside Milwaukee, focus on her latest project, "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I – XVIII."

"Ours is different, and is the first time that more than one series has been shown in the same place at the same time," says Hostetler.

Here, Hostetler suggested and Simon agreed to include excerpts from three series: "The Innocents," from 2002, "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar," from five years later, and 2010's "Contraband."

"For me it's really important because it brings up the larger issues about photography that her work raises, which has to do with how photography translates memory and how it serves as a source of information and specifically whether photographs can stand alone as sources of information," says Hostetler.

"Through the show you realize that they really can't. That text alters the meaning, for better or for worse."

Geographically, the shows are hung chronologically, with "The Innocents" on the left, "Contraband" to the right and "An American Index" as the link in the middle.

But, says, Hostetler, you can pop in and start anywhere and join the visual conversation.

"Each series has its own distinct flavor and subject matter," she says. "The insights complement each other but they don't depend on each other for meaning."

But, why not start at "The Innocents" with its 11 portraits of men convicted of crimes they were later cleared of via DNA evidence. Each subject is photographed at a location relevant to his conviction: the scene of the crime, the location of arrest, etc.

"You get the sense that these aren't your ordinary portraits," says Hostetler. "The people aren't smiling for the camera and kind of saying cheese. There's kind of an unsettled sensibility and when you find out why the portraits were made that becomes more clear."

The portraits are really catalysts that get you thinking about the nature of memory and about how photographs affect our memories. Like those moments from our childhoods that we think we remember but sometimes are actually seared into our brains via the photographs we've since looked at that capture the moments.

"An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar," meanwhile, gets us thinking about how text can alter our ideas about images.

The first image shows a few dozen black dots glowing blue. The dots are arranged on a black field in what almost looks like a rough map of the United States.

It is hauntingly lovely.

Then, we read the text panel – which is purposely printed in very small font size – and learn that it is called, "Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, Cherenkov Radiation, Hanford Site, U.S. Department of Energy, Southeastern Washington State, 2005/2007."

"What happens is a picture can have multiple meanings and the text kind of tells you what to think about it and controls your interpretation," says Hostetler.

Looking at the photos and then reading the panels makes you wonder what it would be like to watch documentary films without narration and attempt to guess what's going on.

The series, says Hostetler, was inspired by the post-Sept. 11 world.

"When the government was looking for weapons of mass destruction – Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, who were hiding – in secret places,. She wondered are there secret places like that in the United States.

"So she did a lot of research and badgered a lot of bureaucrats and called in her connections and got access to a lot of different types of places and then she set up her 8x10 view camera and made these really crisply detailed photographs. They're very beautiful and then the text is small so you can't see what it says when you get the first impression."

One of the final photos displayed from the series shows a pile of items that were confiscated by U.S. Customs agents.

"This was the seed for the 'Contraband' work," says Hostetler. "It is also quite reminiscent of a 17th century Dutch still life, with the pig's head and the half-eaten rotten food. That gives us the kind of underbelly of our global materialistic society. It's quite a compendium of items that give you a particular view of American society by what we forbid or prohibit."

That single shot and the experience that created it got Simon thinking and led her to live for five days in the confiscation room at New York's JFK Airport, where she photographed everything that arrived in the room.

There is fruit, there is cow urine, there are weapons, seeds, counterfeit BMW marques and Fendi bags ...

The result was more than 1,000 photographs and the images included are encased in long plastic boxes mounted to the wall. It looks like a room-sized catalog.

"What you really get is this overwhelming sense of all these commodities that have been isolated for our review," says Hostetler.

"They make them seem like precious objects in a jewel box but they're preventing our physical access to them, so they're still separated from us. Although all these objects were stopped at the border, their images continue to circulate. The image is less substantial than the object, but more indelible."

"Taryn Simon: Photographs and Texts" offers a really thought-provoking look at three of the artist's most important works. It will also offer up a chance to hear Simon speak. She will give a talk in the museum's auditorium on Saturday, Nov. 19 at 1:30 p.m.

For the museum – and for Milwaukee – it couldn't come at a better time.

"There is sort of a critical mass of interest in her," says Hostetler. "I think I proposed this show to her in 2007, so it's taken a lot of time. She's had some media attention, but right now there's a lot of it because she's got shows in so many places. But (it's) like a perfect storm of interest right now, which is just lucky for us."