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"A unique photographic archive of rescued negatives portraying people in China Beijing Silvermine is a unique photographic portrait of the capital and the life of its inhabitants following the Cultural Revolution. It covers a period of 20 years, from 1985, namely when silver film started being used massively in China, to 2005, when digital photography started taking over. These 20 years are those of China's economic opening, when people started prospering, travelling, consuming, having fun"
- FORMAT festival, (2013). Beijing Silvermine 2009-2013. Available: http://www.formatfestival.com/artists/beijing-silvermine-2009-2013. Last accessed 19th March 2013.
Thomas Sauvin's work links well to this. Aswell as being a practitioner who is speaking and exhibiting at the festival, his work also concerns the images we take as ordinary human beings rather than artists. Images with great sentimental value, to someone. In a similar manner to Erik Kessels work, he takes work which was made very innocently and privately out of its context and into a more artistic realm.
Silvermine - Thomas Sauvin from Emiland Guillerme on Vimeo.
I refer to Thomas Sauvin's work as a very pure form of documentary. Yes, there is some bias and unreliabilty as he only has images which have been discarded to work with. But he is using images which have been made innocently and not with any particular agenda in mind. He has gone through hundreds of thousands of negatives and narrowed down series of works which have a common thread (people around landmarks, people posing with ronald macdonald) but they all document an influx of western influences to China, and the images are made by the people embracing the influx. If Thomas had gone around china photographing items which signified the west (whether he had done it in 1987 or 2013) then it would still have a bias of an outsider looking in, and the images would be based upon his personal experience.
Although the video discusses more about Thomas Sauvin's process of making the work, and the exhibition at The Chocolate Factory in Derby exhibits a small amount of images, he does talk of there being many series and common threads throughout his collection of negatives. People posing with electrical appliances, and people visiting the same lake and waterfall were just two strands that I was actually quite interested in. I hope that in the future he releases the series which he has envisioned, as right now I feel that the work is more conceptual than artistic. The video by the animator Lei Lei which accompanies the work is very interesting, and gives the work more justice than just prints on a wall.
I cannot embed a piece by Lei Lei, but a short edit of this work can be found at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2013/jan/04/chinese-amateur-photography-animation-video1
Update 22/03/13
An important statement which I forgot when originally writing this post, was that the reading of the work varies drastically by the country it is shown in. To me, someone who grew up in England and has only ever travelled to France as a child, the work is very interesting, as I have never been to china and am not the most familiar with it. But as Thomas stated at the Format conference, if he shows this work in China, people are generally uninterested. They say they have the same images at home, so why would they be interested? The factor of audience and output of work in documentary can have a significant impact
References
pictures
- Thomas Sauvin, (2013), Silvermine [ONLINE]. Available at: http://www.booooooom.com/2013/03/21/beijing-silvermine-thomas-sauvin/ [Accessed 02 April 13].
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