After the Cultural Revolution
February 17, 2019 4:45 PM   Subscribe

Beijing Silvermine is an archive of half a million negatives salvaged over the last seven years from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing. đź“·[instagram]

The lack of context is frustrating (why do those men have pillows on their heads while they are playing cards?), but there it is.
posted by unliteral (21 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Im torn on this because on the one hand the images are great, and it’s good to keep a record of a relatively unknown piece of Chinese history, especially since the Chinese government is far from a reliable custodian of its own history.

But on the other, “salvaging” people’s intentionally discarded negatives and publishing them feels... deeply intrusive? Especially since many or most of these people are likely still alive and living in Beijing, and many of the photos are quite personal.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 5:08 PM on February 17, 2019 [6 favorites]


By way of analogy, if somebody found an old phone of mine that I’d thrown away, scraped the data off it and published those images online as a quirky “check out what Europeans were doing in the early 00s!” project, I think I’d be pretty fucked off about it.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 5:12 PM on February 17, 2019 [6 favorites]


Yeah, I mean...how is this different than digging people's journals out of a landfill and publishing them on the web?
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:12 PM on February 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yeah this seems like exoticism and I dislike it.
posted by Admiral Viceroy at 5:20 PM on February 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Publishing people's private photos in the web is a dickish thing to do.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:25 PM on February 17, 2019 [2 favorites]



Yeah this seems like exoticism and I dislike it.

No more exotic then what you would find in National Geographic. As someone born and grew up in China, these photos, the people in them, the clothes they wear, the surroundings etc, evoke a sense of nostalgia in me. I find them very moving.
posted by Pantalaimon at 5:30 PM on February 17, 2019 [6 favorites]


Im surprised by people's outrage here. I think it's really interesting and cool. There is such a thing as "found footage" film festivals and collections of old random personal photos, and yes they include "Europeans" so choosing to view this as exoticism seems like a real stretch. It's just interesting to see random photos of people.
posted by Liquidwolf at 5:34 PM on February 17, 2019 [9 favorites]


I don’t want to take up all the oxygen in the thread, so I’ll just make a few final points before bowing out:

1) I sent these to a friend who I know from China, and they pointed out that there are photos here from 2013. So this is far from being ancient history.

2) as Admiral Viceroy says, this feels very orientalising - it’s hard to imagine a photographer doing this in their home country, because they would more likely recognise the image subjects as people like them, with an expectation of privacy.

3) The invasion of privacy is the main ethical issue, but the context is important, too. China is still quite culturally conservative, as well as increasingly authoritarian. I saw several cheesecake shots on a quick scan through the website. While nobody would enjoy having their personal, sexualised pictures published on the internet without consent, I suspect that those images would be even more mortifying for their subjects than your typical French photographer might expect. And there may well be politically incriminating images there too. (I didn’t see any, but then again I don’t read Chinese.)
posted by chappell, ambrose at 5:38 PM on February 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


No more exotic then what you would find in National Geographic.

National Geographic last year apologized for its history of exoticising people through its photography. I think it's very easy to think NBD if it's happening to people on the other side of the world from where you are, but imagine if these were you or your neighbor's photos.
posted by axiom at 5:51 PM on February 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


Publishing people's private photos in the web is a dickish thing to do.

After they've been discarded or otherwise abandoned? We got pretty excited about Vivian Maier a while back, though those negatives were notably much older.
posted by mhoye at 5:57 PM on February 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


I think it's very easy to think NBD if it's happening to people on the other side of the world from where you are, but imagine if these were you or your neighbor's photos.

it’s hard to imagine a photographer doing this in their home country, because they would more likely recognise the image subjects as people like them, with an expectation of privacy.

What do you mean? This happens all the time in this country. People post old strange found photos etc.
posted by Liquidwolf at 5:59 PM on February 17, 2019 [8 favorites]


(why do those men have pillows on their heads while they are playing cards?)

They can't afford helmets?
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:09 PM on February 17, 2019


And I'm suggesting that there's an ethical issue with posting photos found anywhere, especially where the subjects are (likely) alive. However, when it's a French guy going all the way to China to scrounge photos, there's an additional layer to unpack there. Why not at least go to a French landfill? What does it mean that some western white dude has taken it upon himself to "[reconstruct] then a large part of the history of popular analogue photography in China."?
posted by axiom at 7:10 PM on February 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


This guys doesn't mind.
posted by unliteral at 8:37 PM on February 17, 2019


Publishing people's private photos in the web is a dickish thing to do.

Then you're going to hate Found Magazine.

Personally, I find this "near-term archaeology" fascinating. Then again, I take a ton of photos and never do anything with them, so the idea of someone finding images I've taken time to capture and sharing them brings me joy.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:15 PM on February 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


I sent these to a friend who I know from China, and they pointed out that there are photos here from 2013. So this is far from being ancient history.

This one is 2008 or later. I'm fairly certain this isn't from the '80s, either.
posted by bradf at 11:33 PM on February 17, 2019


Then you're going to hate Found Magazine.

While I'm not sure if I agree with the position that axiom and chappelle, ambrose are staking out, "but look at all these other people doing it" isn't a spectacular counterargument. For what it's worth, I think the "everydayness", as Gotanda puts it, is an important and humanizing part of this whole thin and a strong counterargument to the claims of exoticism, this whole exercise would certainly feel better if these photos didn't come with the baggage of the present day.
posted by mhoye at 6:25 AM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


As chappell, ambrose pointed out, these photos are from c2013 and that's not that old. If my "found photos" were published, I'd throw a fit.

The takeaway here is you should destroy old photos and negatives before tossing in the trash. Same for old phones, drop them in acid or something.
posted by james33 at 6:33 AM on February 18, 2019


Same for old phones

Huh, that's interesting. I would certainly be actively, reflexively hostile to this project if we were talking about photos recovered from disused phones as opposed to film. I wonder how much of my willingness to be ambivalent here is being driven by some fetishization of film as a medium, or by an idea that distorted or blown-out 35mm photos must be inherently dated.

Certainly if some organization showed up and said, here's a bunch of pictures people took on their phones before they recycled those phones, all curated and displayed for your entertainment, I'd find that extremely invasive regardless of the content. I'm not sure why I should feel differently about film.
posted by mhoye at 7:36 AM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


I'm not sure why I should feel differently about film.

Depending on how the photos are (or aren't) processed from old phones, you can get a LOT more information than is available from a physical photograph. For example, a musician included a photo of a plant in their home, as casual artwork in an internet release. I poked around the metadata and found lat-long in NYC, and that felt like I was invading their privacy. The photo was general enough that it'd be really hard to identify that level of detail from the image alone, so I don't think they intended to more or less leave their address in the photo. Per the GeoID, it was an apartment complex, so there was some obfuscation of the specific location, but if you took a photo in a stand-alone building and shared that image with GeoID included, that's as good as handing someone your address.

How To Geek has some more info on EXIF, how to view it and how to clear it, for Windows and OS X (as of 2017).
posted by filthy light thief at 12:09 PM on February 18, 2019 [1 favorite]


My mom just died a couple of months ago. and she really liked to take pictures. She made doubles and sometimes triples of every photo, so we just threw away the negatives because it was unlikely that we would ever need them. If I had thought that there might be people skulking around garbage dumps looking for old negatives, we might have had a bonfire instead. I wouldn't mind showing any of them to friends and family, but there are things that strangers simply do not need to see.
posted by ambulocetus at 10:12 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


« Older “Serious About Snacks”   |   ✨ It's full of stars ✨ Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments