SAUVIN, Thomas - Silvermine

Background information

Between 2009 and 2013, Beijing-based collector Thomas SAUVIN amassed, archived and edited more than half a million negatives destined for destruction. The 'Silvermine albums' offer a unique photographic portrait of the Chinese capital and the lives of its inhabitants covering a period of 20 years – from 1985, when silver film came into widespread use in China,  to 2005 when digital photography came to the fore. In these souvenir snapshots taken by anony-mous and ordinary Chinese people, we are witnessing the birth of post-socialist China.

Content

"'Silvermine' is a set of five photo albums each containing 20 prints. The negatives were salvaged from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing, where they had been sent to be filtered for their silver nitrate content.

Each album focuses on a different theme:
1) Blue album: 'TVs and Fridges'
2) Green album: 'One and Two'
3) Orange album: 'Marilyn and Ronald'
4) Pink album: 'Party and Transvestites'
5) Yellow album: 'Leisure and Work'." (publisher 's note, © Archive of Modern Conflict, 2013)

Reviews

"The result of salvaging more than 500,000 negatives from an illegal recycling site on the outskirts of Beijing, Thomas SAUVIN's contemporary masterpiece, a collection of five beautifully bound albums, offers a truly unique glimpse of China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.  Spanning a period of 20 years, the photographs are a litany of 'ordinary' people partying, travelling or even posing next to their TVs and fridges – in short, opening up to the world and assuming the guise of modernity.Through his intervention, Thomas SAUVIN has not only rescued a corpus of vernacular photography from oblivion but produced a hugely significant, complex, and most crucially, unassuming project.A catalogue of the Orient minus the orientalism." (© Tim Clark)
ONE BOOK OF MARTIN PARR'S TOP TEN IN 2013! - TIM CLARK: THE BEST PHOTO BOOKS OF 2013 -  MATTHEW CARSON, ICP Library: Ten photobooks from 2013

About French photo artist, Thomas SAUVIN

Photo books by Thomas SAUVIN