The Musée Nicéphore Niépce is offering an off-site photography residency at the Domaine Prosper Maufoux, which is supporting this initiative through sponsorship. Jean-Vincent Simonet, the first artist selected, presents here the works created in situ in the château’s winery.
In the hustle and bustle of the Château de Saint-Aubin grape harvest, Jean-Vincent Simonet conducted an artistic residency between grape clusters and presses. Away from the studio, in an unfamiliar environment, the artist attuned his practice to the ritualized rhythm of working in the vineyard.
At the château, although he initially documented the stages of the harvest, from picking to sorting, from destemming to pressing, from maceration to fermentation, in the manner of a classic photographer, Jean-Vincent Simonet produced a work far from the postcard image, from the déjà vu of the world of vines and wine. For him, photography is only the first step in the process, the raw material for his creations.
Jean-Vincent Simonet maintains a desacralized relationship with photography. Coming from a family of printers for three generations, he has instinctively and empirically managed to divert the tools and materials of industrial printing. Usually standardized and calibrated, inkjet photographic prints are for him only a primary medium. The artist uses the machines in a way contrary to their intended purpose, choosing unsuitable paper and, through innovative physical and chemical interventions, drying, rinsing, he mistreats the surface in post-production. These tools designed for the many then become the instruments for creating unique pieces. The industrial machine gives way to the artisanal gesture.
Jean-Vincent Simonet pushes the boundaries of the medium. Freeing photography from its overly real, overly documentary nature, the artist restores its full pictorial dimension. In this work, he illustrates the living, liquid, and moving material where the transformation and metamorphosis of the photographic medium echo winemaking.
Born in 1991 in Bourgoin-Jallieu, Jean-Vincent Simonet graduated from ECAL (École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne) in 2014. Since then, he has lived between Paris and Zurich, not to mention the many trips back to his hometown to carry out his experiments. He has exhibited in various institutions and galleries, such as the Centre de la photographie (Geneva), the Fotomuseum (Winterthur), FOAM (Amsterdam), the Webber Gallery (London), the Ravestijn Gallery (Amsterdam), the CentroCentro (Madrid), the Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), and the Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie.
His works are featured in several private and public collections, including the Vontobel Art Collection, Photo Elysée, FOAM, Swiss Post, Mirabaud Contemporary Art, and the LUMA Foundation.
He collaborates with numerous magazines, including Novembre, Aleï Journal, British Journal of Photography, FOAM Magazine, Vogue Singapore, Magazine Magazine, and IMA. He also works for fashion houses such as Christian Louboutin, Louis Vuitton, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Adidas, Hermès, and Loewe.
Close to Japanese photography and its relationship to the printed object, books are a medium of choice for his work. He is the author of Maldoror (self-published, 2014), In Bloom (SPBH Editions, 2018), Whirling Coils (self-published, 2021), Waterworks (RVB Books, 2021), Kitengela (Mousse Publishing, 2024) and Fashion Eye: Osaka (Louis Vuitton, 2025).
