Percevoir, the collection dedicated to emerging talents in photography, welcomes Thomas Sauvin and his photographic archive work from negatives collected in a Chinese center for waste.
In 2009, artist Thomas Sauvin embarked on an extraordinary adventure: collecting negatives to be destroyed in a recycling area north of Beijing. He bought bags by the kilo which he sorted, classified and restored. He thus saved nearly half a million anonymous photographs from oblivion, single-handedly carrying out one of the most important photographic archive work in China. His collection, which he calls “Beijing Silvermine”, has since radiated through multiple exhibitions, collaborations and publications. Here again, it offers material for a new exploration: showing the life of Chinese men and women over the ages of life. The artist and novelist François Durif accompanies these anonymous images with a text on trace and memory.
To perceive (verb tr.): to grasp, to take cognizance with the senses, intuition or understanding. Éditions de La Martinière encourages new talents in photography and the visual arts through “Percevoir”, a collection of books that takes another look on the image: moving, fragmentary and multiple, like the world around us. Each artist has a unique response. A collection is directed by Simon Baker, director of the European House of Photography.
Born in 1983, Thomas Sauvin is a French collector, artist and publisher who works between Paris and Beijing. His “Beijing Silvermine” collection has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Nicéphore Niepce Museum, Paris Photo, the Canton Museum of Art, and the Cartier Foundation. It is part of the collections of the TATE, the BNF, as well as the Center Pompidou.
François Durif is a graduate of the Beaux-Arts in Paris (1997). From his various professional experiences outside the art world, and in particular the three years spent in a funeral home, he has made his favorite material for installations, performances and, today, stories. Vide Sanitaire (Verticales, 2020) is his first published story.
Thomas Sauvin
Thomas Sauvin , François Durif
20.9€
170 x 240 mm
128 pages
June 10 2022
ISBN : 9791040111146
20.9€
www.editionsdelamartiniere.fr
