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Exotic World Travel
John Simone Photography

John Simone's
Photographic Voyages

A Curious Visual Atlas of the World

Exhibited
June 18 - July 5, 2026
Youngplace Arts Centre ~ Toronto

John Simone’s Photographic Voyages brings together 300 photographs
from 50 countries and five continents, created during Simone’s five years working
as Senior Photographer and Photography Teacher aboard Princess Cruises.

The photographs are organized into 38 themed grids
and feature groupings. Each grid gathers images from different places
by rhythm, contrast, humour, subject, colour, gesture, and feeling
rather than by geography alone.

The written descriptions act as short interpretive keys.
They do not explain every image; they open the connections between them
— sacred and strange, comic and ceremonial, natural and artificial,
ordinary and absurd.

Together, the grids form a visual field: part archive,
part travel record, part personal map of what happens when
a photographer keeps looking closely at the world in motion.

Click to Open and Enlarge

Artist Statement

In the 1980s,
I photographed New York nightlife—
club kids, celebrities, beautiful chaos,
and the theatre of being seen. It was a sealed ecosystem:
exaggerated, performative, and completely
convincing while you were inside it.

Years later,
I went looking again—
this time across more than 50 countries,
without a scene to belong to and without knowing
what I was looking for.

What I found
wasn’t so different.

A curious world,
where the sacred and the strange sit
comfortably side by side. Where devotion, decoration,
humour, and spectacle blur into one continuous performance—
sometimes intentional, sometimes not.

A carved figure,
a storefront display, a gesture between strangers—
each operating with its own logic, its own sense
of importance, its own quiet absurdity.

The boundaries begin to slip:
between reverence and play, nature and artifice,
history and now. Things start to feel familiar for
reasons you can’t quite explain.

John Simone's
Photographic Voyages
brings together 300 photographs from a much
larger archive, installed as a continuous visual field.
There is no fixed path—only a rhythm of looking,
noticing, and connecting.

I’m not interested
in capturing the world. I’m interested
in catching it in the act—
just before it explains itself.

Artist Biography

John Simone began his career
photographing New York nightlife in the late 1980s—Downtown,
celebrities, and club superstars and the beautifully
constructed chaos of people being seen.

Working under the name Johnny Paparazzo,
in Toronto he documented a world where identity, performance,
and spectacle blurred into something both glamorous and
faintly absurd. He wasn’t just photographing
the scene—he was inside it, watching it,
and quietly taking it apart.

Years later, Simone turned
that same eye outward, travelling to more
than 50 countries and photographing without a fixed subject—
only an instinct for the telling detail,
the strange coincidence, the moment that
reveals more than it explains.

His current exhibition,
John Simone's Photographic Voyages,
brings together 300 photographs from a vast archive,
installed as a continuous visual field.

Moving between cultures,
objects, gestures, and environments,
the work reflects a consistent perspective:
that the world, everywhere, is performing—
sometimes knowingly, often not.

"Simone’s photography doesn’t
try to capture the world.
It catches it in the act."