Éléonore Simon
Valparaíso
Mar 5 - 28 , 2026
Valparaíso, volver o volar
All bridges end in the sky
All houses are triangular, impossible to furnish
All staircases stop halfway up the hill
You can only return, or fly away
- a Valparaiso, Joris Ivens
Set between steep hillsides and the Pacific, the Chilean seaport of Valparaíso is a city of improbable houses, narrow winding streets, vertiginous stairs, and sudden openings. Movement is rarely linear and orientation remains provisional, illusory.
Removed from the immediacy of color, anecdote, and postcard imagery, Éléonore Simon’s black-and-white photographs allow the mythical city to exist in a suspended and ambiguous time, where gestures, scenes and fragments resist narrative resolution. Inhabitants are caught in passing; cityscapes and figures are partially concealed, interrupted by fences, walls, or shadows; the horizon is glimpsed but never fully offered. Harsh coastal light plays a central role—cutting, obscuring, revealing—structuring the images as much as the city’s impossible architecture, while continually unsettling perception.
Volver o volar, to return or fly away, names a tension that runs through the series, rooted in the artist’s long-standing experience of arrivals and departures. After several years in Valparaíso, Simon photographs the city from a place of partial belonging, shaped by distance and curiosity, attention and introspection. Firmly rooted in lived experience and everyday situations, her photographs tread a delicate line between reality and imagination, observation and reverie, playfulness and mystery, always seeking to keep the balance, step by step, image by image.
In-Person Artist Talk
Sat, Mar 28 at 2 PM
Éléonore Simon (French-American, b. 1987, she/her) is a photographer and writer based in Paris. Informed by a background in art history and literature, she approaches photography as a space of sensitivity, attention, and possibility.
A self-taught artist, her first love is street photography. Today, she continues to explore the poetry of everyday moments through a contemplative, open-ended approach that extends into a broader fine art practice and alternative photographic processes.
Her work has developed between periods in France, New York, and Chile. Valparaíso, volver o volar (2017–2021) brings together her years in Chile, shaped by close attention to moments of tension and suspension in the port city.
Simon’s photography has been exhibited internationally and published in magazines and anthologies dedicated to contemporary street photography. She is a member of the UP Photographers collective and a regular speaker at international photography festivals. She is also an active writer, collaborating with artists and contributing to publications such as Revue EPIC and Process Magazine.