Simone Simon

Photographer by profession, Simone Simon has been developing an artistic practice for fifteen years, mixing shots, videos, sound recordings and written testimonies. Each of his projects is built in a pragmatic way, to render a raw, often poetic reality. Anchored in a social approach, she seeks in the subjects she captures a living testimony, where absence and time weigh sometimes as a threat, sometimes as a hope.

In this early afternoon that announces a Coast that we love so much and that we finally find again, after these few months of barbarism, this Coast so nicely named by Stephen Liégeard, of azure, I look, interloped, at this face -that of Simone Simon- while we are both sitting, side by side, on the orange skai sofa of my office. To tell the truth, it is she who turns to me and looks at me. Her narrow shoulders, her whole bust, her legs one against the other with her hands delicately put on them, her whole body sets as “objective” to look at me and not only. She sees me. Does she know that inside I’m having fun with this name that transpires with ambiguity? I have two questions. Who is this woman?

We made an appointment for me to write a text about her, about her work.

Like everyone else, I see her regularly at openings. We greet each other and talk about the works on display, the artists, everything and nothing. Finally, I realize that she is a stranger to me.

She came with a plastic bag containing a book. And, as if it were useless, shows me the contents quickly, turning the pages with a certain embarrassment, almost in a hurry to get rid of this formality which, I too, embarrassed me. I hate these moments. Very quickly his smile takes over. She talks to me… about others.

What I know best about her? These are some of the photographs seen at Eva Vautier’s gallery. Rigorous photographs that, at the time, seemed distant, almost cold, photographs of architecture taken in Eastern countries, I believe. Small format photographs at modest prices that convinced me, without me really knowing why. She tells me about this work. I am absent, I hardly listen to her, I look at her and, in turn, I see her.

I understand now. What I had identified as cold distance, is only honesty, sincerity, modesty and… prohibitions.

She refrains from any form of corruption, she who worked for a time for the fashion press. She forbids herself any egocentric ambition, she who today dares not call herself an artist. She refrains from any form of grandiloquence, she who devotes herself to the sole pleasure of photographing. She refrains from talking about herself, she who is always interested in others.

This honesty, this sincerity, this modesty are really the material with which she works, in addition, of course, to her camera.

If I had to mention only one work, or rather one project, since this is how she considers her way of working, it would certainly be the one realized in Nice in 2007/2008 Les Portes Du Saint-Pierre. A project, meetings, testimonies, women’s words on their city where she has, with an astonishing acuity and a remarkable accuracy, not only testified to the daily life of the women of this suburb but also really made a work. As always, this project was published in a deceptively modest manner.

Like in Boxing Club, a short film made earlier in 2006, or in the project Don’t watch the fox go by, the one she is working on today and which she presents to me with a thoughtful enthusiasm. It is the human being who is at the heart of his preoccupations, sometimes to the point of absence, as in these photographs found at Eva Vautier’s.

At the end of our conversation and as the light is slowly fading, I walk this small figure, so bright in this late afternoon, to the gate. How quickly time can pass. I forgot Simon… and I dare not tell him that I find her beautiful, that her work touches me and that I would have so much pleasure to write a few words about Simone.

Yves Peltier