Somewhere in the American South, a man puts down his guitar and raises his camera.
On stage, an old blues pianist may be playing his last songs. Simon Arcache presses the shutter, not to freeze a show, but to keep a trace of what will soon no longer be heard. Having come to photography through music, he has made film a way of listening.
A few weeks before his exhibition in Hendaye, a portrait of a photographer who puts people and music at the centre of the image.
Born in 1992 near Paris, Simon Arcache is a photographer but also a musician. It all started with a guitar: Simon accompanied musicians on stage, then in 2012 he went to the United States and joined the team at the Music Maker Relief Foundation, a non-profit organisation that supports blues musicians in hardship. That is where, alongside them, he really learned to take photographs. His training did not happen in a classroom, but in clubs and backstage, as close as possible to the people he spent time with.
This dual practice gives him a unique position. When he photographs a musician, he already knows what it means to go on stage, to wait in the dressing room, to accompany a musician in front of a half-empty room. That familiarity shows in his images: in his portraits there is the trust of someone who has been let in.
His work sits between documentary photography, which tells reality, and authored photography, which takes a point of view. Simon Arcache doesn't just record what he sees: he chooses, frames and interprets. The photographer is also a witness engaged with what he looks at.
His series Going Up, Going Down came out of several stays in the American South. In the lands where the blues grew up, he sets out to meet elderly, sometimes forgotten musicians whose living memory risks dying with them. They are not stars: they are men and women who devoted their lives to music, and whom official history has rarely remembered.
Among them is Ironing Board Sam, a pianist with an unlikely nickname, who suffered a stroke in 2015 after more than fifty years on stage. Photographing him is already a way of fighting oblivion. Here the project goes beyond simple music reportage to become a matter of passing things on. Simon Arcache puts it this way:
« These photographs are my way of giving back to these artists a little of what they gave me, by showing what can sometimes no longer be heard. »
It's all in that sentence: the image extends the sound, keeping a presence when the voice falls silent. Going Up, Going Down earned him the 2023-2024 Voltaire Photography Prize and a series of exhibitions, notably at the Château de Voltaire in Ferney (01) and the Château de Bussy-Rabutin (21).
The series "Going up, Going down" was produced as part of the 2024 Voltaire Photography Prize by the Confrontations Photo festival, in partnership with the Centre des Monuments Nationaux and the Gex local branch of Crédit Agricole Centre-Est.
© Photo credit Simon Arcache
Simon Arcache works in black and white, on film, from developing to printing, which he masters as a professional, working at the PCP lab in Paris and at home. This choice is not nostalgic affectation. Film imposes slowness and economy of gesture: you don't shoot wildly, you wait for the right moment, you accept that you won't keep everything.
This slowness is a form of listening. Where digital encourages accumulation, film demands patience, the same patience you need to sit beside an old musician and let him open up. The photographer's gesture then meets the musician's: both know that a well-placed silence is worth more than one note too many.
This rigour continues all the way to the print. The grain of the film, the depth of the blacks, the texture of the paper: nothing is left to chance, and everything matches the texture of his subjects. The result is not a smooth, cold image, but a presence, almost tactile: a face you feel you could touch.
Ultimately, what interests Simon Arcache is not so much the blues as a musical genre, but the communities that keep it alive. Through them he explores broader questions: otherness, identity, memory, the way a story is handed down from one generation to the next. The blues is only a way in to the human being.
It is precisely this shift, from show to intimacy, from performance to person, that places his work in the tradition of humanist photography, which puts ordinary people at the centre of the image. A tradition that the Argia collective embraces, which makes his presence among us only natural.
His work continues with the series Les Fils de Bambara, supported by a grant from the VU' agency, and Le Cabaret de Poussière. His work has been published in Polka, Fisheye and Like, and exhibited in France and abroad. Everywhere, the same attention: leaving a trace for those who don't always leave one.
It was only natural for the Argia collective to invite him to the first edition of its Crossed Perspectives, entitled Sound and Vision: a title that already says it all: the dialogue between image and sound.
During Crossed Perspectives #1, Arnaud Elissalde, president of the Argia collective, talked with Simon Arcache about his series Going Up, Going Down, his encounters with blues musicians and his attachment to film. A conversation to watch below.
Exhibitions, events, calls for projects and blog articles: get the key news from the Argia Collective straight to your inbox.
Grain, chemistry, light: dive deeper into film photography.
Cookies
We and selected third parties use cookies or similar technologies for technical purposes and, with your consent, for experience, measurement and marketing.
