Until Death Do Us Part / Thomas Sauvin
$55.00
Thomas Sauvin
Until Death Do Us Part
53 x 83 x 21mm
108pp, paperback
Hardcover, with a cigarette box
Third Edition (currently it has four editions)
Published by Jiazazhi Press, 2018
"Until Death Do Us Part" focuses on the unexpected role cigarettes play in Chinese weddings. As a token of appreciation, it is customary for the bride to light a cigarette for each and every man invited. The bride and the groom are then invited to play some cigarette-smoking games of an unprecedented ingenuousness. This publication pays homage to a tradition in which love and death walk hand in hand. These photos come from the Beijing Silvermine project, an archive of half a million negatives salvaged over the years from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing.
This book is nominated as one of the best photobooks in Fotobookfestival Kassel 2016
This book is selected as one of the best photobooks by photo-eye and New York Times in 2015.
Quantity
Artist Info
Since 2009, the French collector and artist Thomas Sauvin has embarked on an unusual adventure: salvaging discarded negatives from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing that were destined to destruction. Undertaking one of the largest and most important archival projects in China, he buys by the kilo, taking away rice bags filled with thousands or rolls of slobbery, dusty and scratched negative film. Once closely examined, images are consistently selected, digitized, and classified. Today it encompasses over half a million of anonymous photographs spanning the period from 1985 to 2005, reconstructing then a large part of the history of popular analogue photography in China. This coherent and unceasingly evolving archive allows us to apprehend negatives in different ways. It constitutes a visual platform for cross-cultural interactions, while impacting on our collective memory of the recent past.
