
Silvermine
- Publisher
- Archive of Modern Conflict
- Year
- 2013
- Specifications
- Set of five hardcover photo albums
11 × 7.7 cm
Each album contains 20 prints
Edition of 200
Chosen by Martin Parr as a Best Photobook of the Year for the British Journal of Photography
Five photo albums of twenty prints each, made from negatives salvaged from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing, where they had been sent to be filtered for silver nitrate. Between 2009 and 2013 Beijing-based collector Thomas Sauvin amassed, archived and edited more than half a million negatives destined for destruction. They give a portrait of the Chinese capital and its inhabitants over twenty years, from 1985, when silver film came into widespread use, to 2005, when digital photography arrived: souvenir snapshots by anonymous ordinary people in which the birth of post-socialist China can be seen. Each album has a theme — TVs and fridges, one and two, Marilyn and Ronald, parties and transvestites, leisure and work.