Steve Simon

I have created a limited series of images available from $100 each. 25% of all sales will go to the food bank New York City. Once you add an image to your cart you will have the option to select a size and finish. All images will be processed by the lab and delivered ASAP. Thanks for your interest in my work. Contact me if you have any questions of suggestions. https://www.foodbanknyc.org/covid-19/

The 2024 Democratic Convention in Chicago

The 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. These images are part of book project on the American Political Convention. Watch for the DNC images coming in August.

For the first time since I started documenting The American Convention, I couldn't physically go. So I sat at my computer and made thousands of screengrabs to cover the convention virtually.

"Somehow, Steve Simon was able to create photographs of the event that stand apart from all others--stunning, unique, intelligent and thought-provoking images which help us to consider the very health of our democracy". Stacey D. Clarkson, Former Art Director, Harper’s Magazine.

“Steve Simon behaves differently. He shows us the staging off-camera and television personalities before they compose their august on-air expressions. He gives us the blur of the secret service removing an unwanted dissident from the arena. Simon is an unusual type of spy, one who records information others regard as irrelevant. We live still in an age when public debate is carefully choreographed, under a government that prizes control. In this setting, in these times, Simon’s images remain renegade.” MARK ENGLER

Election Night November 5, 2008 in Harlem, New York. "I'm way happy," Thomasina Wright said. "It means that I can tell my seven grandchildren that they have a chance to be president." Inaugural for President Obama, Washington, DC; January 20, 2009...

Growing up in Montreal, my family would often venture into the strange new world that was so different from my home, yet just an hour away. The United States has held a fascination for me ever since. I was one of the 85 per cent of all Canadians who live within 200 kilometers of the American border. After reading a newspaper article describing the many ways Canada was becoming more and more like its southern neighbor, my curiosity about life on the other side of the border was rekindled, and I was inspired. I set out on a road trip across the imaginary line that makes up the largest undefended border in the world, to see and experience for myself The United States at its northern edge. The events of 9/11 have certainly impacted our notions of freedom and personal security. I traveled and photographed freely across the 5,500- mile stretch from Alaska to Maine, both before and after the historic marker of 9/11. I stopped in small towns as well as big cities to get a sense of life there, with serendipity as my guide. It was an extraordinary road trip filled with remarkable and often inspiring people, just living their lives. I feel that America has the best of everything, and the worst of everything. But the feeling in America that I couldn't shake: was a sense of confinement. Whether confined by fear, economic limitations, gated communities, racial barriers, or closed minds; this does not seem like the land of the free.

It must be understood, without any hint of heady romanticism, that Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, when I was most impressionable, was a continent of vitality, growth and boundless expectation. It got into your blood, your viscera, your heart. You can understand, therefore, how painful it is to visit my beloved Africa under present day circumstances. It’s not just the ruinous economic and social decline, it’s the ravaging of the pandemic; it’s the way in which a communicable disease called AIDS has taken countries by the throat and reduced them to spectral caricatures of their former selves. I have to say that the ongoing plight of Africa forces me to perpetual rage. It’s all so unnecessary, so crazy that hundreds of millions of people should be thus abandoned. From Race Against Time, Stephen Lewis United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa.

I wasn’t there on that day, but flying home to New York City eight days later, the area around the former World Trade Center was still smoking. It was real. As I walked around the periphery, I felt a strange resonance. And as I looked around me, the people that felt compelled to come down to the site all seemed in a state of shock. The site had become an uncomfortable tourist attraction, but during the first three months after the attack when these photos were taken, there was no platform built—people would make their way to the area, drawn like magnets to Ground Zero, for their own reasons. They would crouch down, stand on cement barriers and snake their way around the site, hoping for a glimpse into the forbidden zone, the sacred burial ground. Peeking through holes in the tarp, anything to satisfy the need to see something of the debris, perhaps for their own confirmation of the unbelievably horrific images, which tortured us over and over again. I started to take pictures because that is what I do—not really knowing why but understanding that the people before my camera and I were all experiencing an unprecedented time and place. Like many who came to the site, I wanted to close my eyes and imagine a world on September 10th. But even with your eyes closed, you feel the wind and the light. Nothing would be the same again.

I have gone all in on the Nikon Mirrorless system and so far I'm loving it. It's an adaptation from a lifetime of DSLR work but now that I'm doing a lot of street photography again, the Nikon Z system could not have come at a better time. Be sure to click on my blog for upcoming posts on my transition.

I have had the good fortune of visiting Tokyo many times. It is one of my favorite places to be with my Nikons.