On the discarded

Where are history’s discarded images? It’s a question that demands to be answered, yet upon actually being answered, demonstrates its own flawed construction. If I can find the images, were they ever really lost?

Every month, Thomas Sauvin journeys to an illegal recycling site on the outskirts of Beijing, searching through troves of discards and refuse, the raw and processed excess of Chinese society. Amongst the millions of objects which find themselves in these warehouses, thousands of images of daily life in China, from around 1985 to 2005, sit, unseen, and waiting to be “rescued”, as Martin Parr observes upon seeing the project. Sauvin, a French artist and photographer, takes great care to preserve, archive, and to look carefully at these images, buying them in bulk from a man who would otherwise melt them in a literal bath of acid for their valuable silver nitrate. The snapshots, taken as a whole, produce what Sontag might call an ecology of images unblemished by the impure intentions of the presumptive documentarian.

“In 36 shots, you have time to meet [the photographer]”

Sauvin’s commitment to making visible these damsels is inspiring, and I feel compelled to ask a question about my own practice, particularly in relation to the internet. If Sauvin’s discards are the physical instantiations of Chinese cultural vernacular, how and where might I find the equivalent continuous sink of visual excess online? Several answers come to mind, and this paper aims to look at this question critically, towards experimental and philosophical provocations surrounding discarded images on the net.

We should start at the beginning, looking at the emergence of digital images, the development of their circulation, and where they end up. We should go from there, testing interventions with images which depict internet culture, leading to the question: is there a vernacular in internet culture? Are there even images out there to find? What does the internet look like?