About the French photo artist, Thomas SAUVIN
In 2009, French collector and artist Thomas SAUVIN embarked on an unusual adventure: recovering negatives from a recycling plant on the outskirts of Beijing that were destined for destruction. He undertakes one of the largest and most important archival projects in China, shopping for miles. He takes rice sacks filled with thousands or rolls of drooling, dusty, scratched negative film. After thorough examination, the images are consistently selected, digitized and classified. Today, his archive includes over half a million anonymous photographs from 1985 to 2005, reconstructing much of the history of popular analog photography in China. This coherent and constantly evolving archive allows us to capture negatives in different ways. It provides a visual platform for cross-cultural interactions while influencing our collective memory of the recent past.
Photo books by Thomas SAUVIN
'Silvermine Albums' (2013); 'Quanshen' (2013); 'METV' (2013); 'Until Death Do Us Part' (2015); 'Xian' (2016); 'No More No Less' (2018); 'Great Leaps Forward' (2019); '17 18 19' (2019); 'Talk Soon' (2021); 'On This Day' (2021, with Klara KÄLLSTRÖM & Thobias FÄLDT)