Can’t wait to present our all time best-seller: Until Death Do Us Part by Thomas Sauvin, published by Jiazazhi
The photo book comes in a cigarette pack, yes, a real cigarette pack and looks just like a normal pack of cigarettes. The Chinese tittle of the book is 双喜, which is also the brand of the cigarette pack, a most popular brand in Shanghai and periphery. 双喜 means double happiness. One can also write it the way as the logo of the brand, which is the symbol used exclusively in the wedding ceremonies in China.
The English title is more poetic and accurate. 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 o f 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.
ABOUT Beijing Silvermine project: 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.
ABOUT Thomas Sauvin : Thomas Sauvin is a French photography collector and editor who lives in Beijing. Since 2006 he exclusively works as a consultant for the UK-based Archive of Modern Conflict, an independent archive and publisher, for whom he collects Chinese works, from contemporary photography to period publications to anonymous photography. Sauvin has had exhibitions of his work, and published through Archive of Modern Conflict.
ABOUT Jiazazhi Press/Library: Jiazazhi Press/Library is an photobook platform based in China, devoting to exploring the possibilities of photo work presentation on paper. Our practices include magazine, publishing project, magazine, book shop, library, pseudo museum,book fair/exhibition. We started at Beijing since 2009, and moved to Ningbo in 2014.