Jean-Vincent Simonet
Jean-Vincent Simonet, In Bloom
Self Publish, Be Happy, London, 2018
ISBN 9781999814458
In Bloom is the translation into images of Jean-Vincent Simon’s sensory experience of nights spent in Tokyo and Osaka. The result is an intense and excessive volume, brimming with images, in which faces, flowers, bodies and streets follow one another and are juxtaposed in a frenetic rhythm that offers the viewer no pause for reflection. These analog photographs are frequently manipulated and pushed to their limits: printed on surfaces where they never dry out, damaged by water and chemicals. Their alterations and degradations, like their unbridled succession, create both a metaphor and a visualisation of an altered state of consciousness, or of a memory that is necessarily fragmentary and merely a snippet of lived experience. Danaé Panchaud