Maybe it’s because San Francisco photographer, Jack Simon, has worked as a psychiatrist for the last four decades that he is able to create work that is layered, complex, and interesting, or perhaps, it’s because he has spent the past seven years working as a street photographer, looking at humorous moments and odd juxtapositions, that he is able to make photographs that add up to something unexpected. His project, Strange Days, causes us to peel back the layers and explore new photographic realities.

This year a series of Jack’s photographs was shown at the International Format Festival in England, in addition he was a co-winner of the Street Photography Now Project and is currently competing as a finalist in the Xperia Studio Reality Remade competition, organized by Street Reverb Magazine. Jack is a member of the Burn My Eye Photo Collective, an international collective aiming to show the extraordinary within the ordinary using candid photography.

I am most interested in finding complex, colorful images, that transcend the documentary specifics of the moment and hopefully evoke stories in the minds of my viewers. My approach is to photograph without a specific theme or idea in mind. When I look back at the photographs I’ve taken certain groupings appear to me like missing pages from the same story, blown across time to different corners of the world. Without telling the full story, I’ve tried to put some of these images back together in portfolios. ‘Strange Days’ like the film I named the portfolio after, is one of these fragmented stories, a puzzle with plenty of missing pieces.

Images from Strange Days