“The Eighth Day" won the The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2019, First PhotoBook of the year. Congratulations to artist Gao Shan, designer Guoxiao and publisher Liang Ni from Imageless. A $10,000 prize will be awarded to the artist.
Gao Shan’s award-winning photobook “The Eighth Day” takes its name from his personal history – on the eighth day after his birth, Shan was adopted by his new mother. The relationship between the two characterized by coldness and indifference, according to Shan’s afterword. Only recently has he started to regard her as more than a mere presence in his life. In his ongoing series, he uses the camera not for cold observation but as an active tool in their relationship. An intimate, emotional photographic document that involves its viewers’s heart and mind. Winner of the 2016 Color Shadows New Award’s “Photographer of the Year” Award.
Sacred Shanghai by photographer and anthropologist Liz Hingley, explores the spaces, rituals and communities – in official, unofficial, public and private forms – that together weave the spiritual fabric of China’s largest and most cosmopolitan city.
Published October 2019120 x 164 mm, 224 pp51 full colour imagesHardback paper-covered, foil debossedCaptions printed on a separate bible paperinserted into each page of the bookAn original talisman is includedText by Ian Johnson (bilingual)ISBN 978-1-910401-38-5Signed edition availablehttps://gostbooks.com/product/sacred-shanghai/
‘China Dream’ explores the fractured identity of the second generation diaspora as they’re straddled their birth country and their motherland. Teresa Eng, whose parents immigrated to Canada from China via Hong Kong, sought out to explore her ancestral homeland between 2013-2017. Teresa’s cultural knowledge of a country which she has never lived, contrasts with the reality of a country in flux. Eng witnessed constant cycles of construction, destruction and reconstruction across multiple cities and its surrounding towns. This inspired the stripped back colours of her images which were achieved in the darkroom.
Each visit offered an insight to a country that is in the process of building its future while simultaneously reconstructing and reinterpreting its past, creating a new type of culture. Historical monuments and buildings, destroyed during Cultural Revolution are being rebuilt haphazardly – often as facsimiles of the originals.
‘China Dream’ – the title of a patriotic calendar found at a newsagents –was also a term popularised in 2013 by General Secretary Xi Jinping. It also alludes to the American Dream, where hard work and entrepreneurial spirit will lift up each individual and the nation into prosperity.
Great Leaps Forward unveils a series of photos drawn from a plastic bag bought in a Beijing flea market in 2016. Sealed tightly with a knot, the bag had settled there unnoticed for many decades. Upon opening the bag, over 300 photos were discovered, taken by an anonymous member of the Xi’an Physical Education University’s department of Photography. All the images, meticulously depicting various athletes in action, often defying gravity, were shot on the same field during a bright day of June 1960.To date, these images are the only photographic record that collector and artist Thomas Sauvin found from the time of The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962). During these years, a chaotic industrialization campaign meant to transform China from an agrarian economy to a new communist regime rooted in industry and large-scale agricultural production led to the deadliest famine of human history. Any photographic documentation from these years remains extremely rare.
Thomas Sauvin kept the negatives presented in this series un-scanned for almost a decade. Even though the artist was intrigued by the content, the risk of scanning official Chinese disposed material could put in jeopardy the (by then) starting Silvermine Project. For this reason, this material was always edited by the artist in its raw negative form. Kept in such a way in the presented book.
‘17 18 19’ is an investigative journey on the practice of those police department photographers and their aesthetic, practice and understanding of photography, composition and art direction. Who are those people? What are the stories behind each item? Why 17 18 19? Are questions that the reader has to solve. As if the book is a piece of evidence itself. Putting the reader in the investigator’s shoes.
‘17 18 19’ was created in a collaboration between Thomas Sauvin and Void. During the artist’s stay in Convento Residency (Portugal) – in September ‘19 – the book was edited, designed and ready to be printed. Which happened in early October ‘19, at MAS, Istanbul.
It is gorgeously printed with metallic silver ink on black paper. And it wasn’t a random aesthetic decision. The black pages allow the photographs to be printed in negative form. And the metallic silver ink ties ‘17 18 19’ to its genesis: the Silvermine Project. The silver and the negatives, once disposed in China, are now recycled into a book form.
Shortlisted by 2019 Paris Photo-Aperture First Book Award. The prevalence of digital cameras has made image making frictionless and photography has become more affordable and seemingly democratic than ever. However, at the same time, as the camera turns more automatic and intuitive in use, its operation and the predetermined programs within it are more concealed from the users. After all, reality does not just get flattened into an image objectively. Cameras look neutral, because we are all ignorant of the decisions that were made by the designers and manufacturers of the cameras before they reach our hands. The translation of reality into image seems direct because we are ignorant of the process that happens inside the cameras, unaware of exactly how 3-dimensional reality is reduced into a 2- dimension print, or digital data. Cameras play an enormous part in how images are encoded with meaning. The camera is programmed to produce photographs, and every photograph is a realisation of one of the possibilities contained within the program of the camera.
As image-making processes and apparatus become more concealed, what appears to be an expansion of freedom is probably a restriction of how new narratives could be created through photography, for as long as there is no way of engaging in such criticism of technical images, we shall remain illiterate.
Thus, this project becomes an attempt to deconstruct and rethink the fundamental elements of photography through looking at the apparatus, methodologies and the image-making process through the hands of two amateur photographers. Through staged performances and elaborate processes, norms and presupposed ideas surrounding photography are taken to the extreme until they begin to fall apart. Obsolete technologies and everyday objects are reinvented, adapted and radicalised. The decision to use “archaic” processes and obsolete devices is not a nostalgic or sentimental one, but rather a realisation that they offer the flexibility and ability for us to elaborate on overlooked mechanisms and the role of the camera in the making of images. This idea is further established through the subverted use of the photographic language from camera manuals. In these instructional images, we, the camera operators, seem to be demonstrating the correct use of the aforementioned apparatus, when actually, we are hacking these devices, violating their original uses, and making them to serve a new purpose.
“Tragédie, Coïncidence et La Double Vie de L.L.D.M” is the second chapter of the trilogy “Memories of Things Past”, a fiction-documentary project based on historical records that Zhen SHI started in 2015. She employs a 19-century Belgian family diary as its source, retracing a series of coincidences and a tragedy related to the diary that have taken place over the years. Combining text, image, correspondence, telephone record, archive and other media in its presentation, the book seeks to explore the complex relationship between reality and memory under the general proposition “Archive and Fiction” / “Private and Public” in the context of contemporary art.
More information:Polycopies6 - 10 November 201917 Quai Anatole France, 75007 Pariswww.polycopies.net
