On October 20, The New Yorker website published a very interesting article about a discovery of the french photographer Thomas Sauvin while he was living in China. In 2009 he found 35mm negatives in a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing, which he bought and became curator of the material.
Those photographs were taken by anonymous Chinese between 1985 – 2005, the zenith of film photography in China, which portrays everyday life, leisure, and travel in China and abroad. Two hundred thousand images were reviewed and grouped by themes.
Sauvin not only printed those negatives, but also worked on some of them by creating amazing effects. He named this project as Beijing Silvermine and created an homonymous Instagram @beijing_silvermine. Several photos were also posted on The New Yorker photo department’s Instagram (@newyorkerphoto), which dedicated an entire week for this project.
Thomas Sauvin says in the article: “The quantity of images involved allowed me to tell not individual stories but something more universal. I often hear people saying that these images show a face of China they haven’t seen before.”
Can you imagine if Sauvin hadn’t found those negatives? It would had been recycled, and those incredible images would had been lost forever.
The Archive of Modern Conflict, which is an independent publisher based in London, UK, published in 2013 a series of 5 hand-made albums, each containing 20 kodak prints from the Beijing Silvermine project, which are sold out.
Since we are working and researching on bookbinding for The Process & Skills class , this is a great example and inspiration for an accordion fold.
There is a great documentary on Vimeo about these project that worth to be seen.
Now you should take a look at more of those amazing and inspiring pictures on their Instagrams. I hope you enjoy as much as I did!
Summer 1993 | 
This disquieting image of a figure constrained within an armored shell and suffocating from an eruption of flames and blood synthesizes Luigi Dallapiccola’s nightmarish operatic tale. In it a Spanish prisoner thinks he has escaped punishment only to find himself in the arms of the Grand Inquisitor and led to a burning stake. Both poster and opera conveyed the pessimism and sense of deception and entrapment prevalent in Cold War Europe.
A keen sense of the absurd and the macabre drew Polish audiences to such writers as Franz Kafka, Harold Pinter, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. This poster was commissioned and printed for a Warsaw dramatization of Kafka’s novel and was also subsequently printed and circulated in Paris, where the designer had moved in 1963. “I wanted to leave Poland to see how my posters would stand up to the neon lights of the West,” he explained in 1993. “I dreamed of Paris.”
Hommage à Roman Cieslewicz | 1930-1996 
Process & Skills 