Beijing Silvermine - Thomas Sauvin from Emiland Guillerme on Vimeo.
I've actually vaguely known about the Beijing Silvermine photo project for some time, just not in any detail. Earlier this year 4A centre for contemporary asian art hosted an exhibition of it, which I saw mainly through Instagram, and didn't quite get.
Their posts seemed to encourage people to take a selfie with a blown up image from the project, of a young woman in really colourful clothes, posing against the backdrop of a national park.
The same photo popped up again a few weeks ago, on The New Yorker Instagram feed. The project's creator Thomas Sauvin was an Instagram guest, and spent a week posting different images he had found. There were photos from a Beast series, featuring Chinese people posing with the craziest of animal sculptures, from giant octopuses to open-mouthed sharks. There was a series based on twin children, photographed throughout the country, a Sun and Moon series too.
When I finally watched a short video about the project, it started to all make sense. Sauvin salvages old negatives that have been thrown away, and processes them, looking for photos of ordinary Chinese people since the advent of the Kodak camera.
What he finds and shares are wonderfully random moments, like someone stepping in front of the photographer's camera at an inopportune moment, and intimate moments too - like family snaps at home, on holidays, and on special occasions. And because it's film, there's a lovely scratchiness to the images that give them warmth, and really make them feel like an entirely different time.
Sauvin, as his name probably gives away, is a Frenchie, whose been living in China for the past ten years. I really love how the doco shows him working with local artists, assistants and photo technicians to help bring the photos back to life. I also think how he groups them is particularly special. Fascinatingly, over time he's discovered that many photos are taken in the exact same locations, often with the same pose from the subject, and very common composition.
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