THE FUTURE WITHOUT YOU
Max Pinckers & Thomas Sauvin
Published by Beijing Silvermine & Lyre Press
IBAN: BE18 7350 3512 1765 / BIC: KREDBEBB
Reference: TFWY
Hardcover, 160 x 220 mm, 222 pages
Graphic design by Ying Lei
Printed by L.capitan (Graphius), Ghent, Belgium
Edition of 800 copies
ISBN 9782957011810
IBAN: BE18 7350 3512 1765 / BIC: KREDBEBB
Reference: TFWY
For this collaboration, Max Pinckers and Thomas Sauvin rummaged through 50.000 transparencies rescued from a recycling center in Beijing. This analog archive from the 1990s consists of stock photos produced in the US which ended up in China when a company subsidiary was opened to market them in a new territory.
The images in this archive cover a wide array of subjects, themes, and photographic styles. They were made with the sole intention of being purchased or licensed for nonspecific contexts. They represent an era of advertising when high-quality, generic visuals would be adopted by companies to avoid the expense and effort of arranging custom photoshoots.
As stock photography embodies the most expressly capitalist form of imagery, Pinckers and Sauvin focused their selection on the world of corporate business represented by actors of limited talent, during a time of anxiety triggered by the arrival of the personal computer and the rise of the Internet.
Revisited 30 years later, there is something amusing—but also disturbing, even prophetic—about these images, which seem to have lost none of their relevance with the advance of artificial intelligence.
The images in this archive cover a wide array of subjects, themes, and photographic styles. They were made with the sole intention of being purchased or licensed for nonspecific contexts. They represent an era of advertising when high-quality, generic visuals would be adopted by companies to avoid the expense and effort of arranging custom photoshoots.
As stock photography embodies the most expressly capitalist form of imagery, Pinckers and Sauvin focused their selection on the world of corporate business represented by actors of limited talent, during a time of anxiety triggered by the arrival of the personal computer and the rise of the Internet.
Revisited 30 years later, there is something amusing—but also disturbing, even prophetic—about these images, which seem to have lost none of their relevance with the advance of artificial intelligence.