The Boundaries Between Digital Artifact and Physical Object with Jean-Vincent Simonet

Santa Fe Workshops collection of free online events, Creativity Continues, features a special talk with French artist and photographer Jean-Vincent Simonet, whose practice explores photography as a material and transformative process. Combining analog and digital tools with his family’s industrial printing heritage, Jean-Vincent treats images as physical objects marked by labor, chemistry, and intervention. His work blurs the line between digital artifact and material presence, using mass-production processes as a site for experimentation.

In this program, Jean-Vincent discusses his two-part approach to image-making. He describes how he begins by photographing places he moves through, collecting fragments, textures, and social traces as raw material rather than finished images. He then explains how he transforms these photographs through reprinting, overexposure, chemical alteration, and physical intervention, often using modified or obsolete machines. Through this process, the image becomes more than representation, acting as a material system that reveals the marks of its own production.

Publishing is also central to Jean-Vincent’s practice. He discusses how photobooks allow him to think in sequences, repetitions, and material variations, while his unique prints deliberately resist mechanical reproduction, becoming singular objects through process-based deviation and chemical instability.

The program concludes as Jean-Vincent engages in a live Q&A with the webinar audience. For those unable to attend live, a recording is available to all registered participants.

Creativity Continues is a program that collectively develops creative voices by offering connection and encouraging expression. Because the goal is to engage all within our creative community, we encourage you to extend invitations and share Santa Fe Workshops Creativity Continues events with anyone who expresses an interest.