THOMAS SAUVIN: MEET THE ARTIST AT THE COMET BOOKSTORE.

A BOOK, A STORY

The “17 18 19” series comes from a bag of negatives recovered from a recycling factory on the outskirts of Beijing in 2010, gathering more than 15,000 images, photographed in one of the city’s detention centres between 1991 and 1993. It is an investigation into the practice of police department photographers, their understanding of photography, composition and artistic direction.

Resulting from a collaboration between the artist Thomas Sauvin and Void Editions, the book asks: Who are these people? What are the stories behind each element? Why 17 18 19? These are the questions it pushes us to solve. As if the book was evidence in itself and the reader was in the place of the investigator.

The edition, limited to 750 copies, is intriguing: the black pages allow the photographs to be printed in negative form, with silver metallic ink, linking “17 18 19” to its genesis: the Silvermine project, which the artist has been working on since 2009. The latter encompasses more than half a million anonymous photographs covering the period from 1985 to 2005, reconstructing a large part of the history of popular analogue photography in China.

Thomas Sauvin will tell us all about this unique book and his experience as a publisher of these vernacular treasures, what they tell of an era and a territory.