Street Photography nominee

I find the urban environment fascinating yet intimidating. Its constant stream of people, visual distractions and dissonance leaves little room for solitude and introspection. This ongoing series is an appropriation of the urban landscape, a search of a quiet beauty in an increasingly crowded world.

Through an aesthetic exploration of spatial and visual relations, I seek a pause in the flow of the city, an isolated figure, a breathing space. These images, shot over several years and across multiple countries, purposefully elude indications of specific locations to convey a sense of universality. Light, shadows and composition play an important part in my images: they conceal and reveal the subjects, enigmatic and largely unidentifiable, within a transformed landscape.

Eléonore Simon is a French photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at the Université Lumière Lyon II in France and at the University of Pennsylvania, and holds an MA in Art History. Eléonore currently works a freelance photographer and studio manager and serves as a teaching assistant at The International Center of Photography in New York.

Her street photography and urban landscapes search for beauty and mystery in ordinary situations. Light, shadow and form come together to reveal the poetics of space and the fragility of the fleeting moment. Her work explores the tension between abstraction and photographic representation: shadows, geometry and graphic elements flatten the image to give it a strong two-dimensional read, in a dynamic dialogue with the three-dimensionality of space. Images are unresolved and convey a sense of fragmentation and melancholy as isolated figures pass through the frames, unaware of the boldness of their surroundings.