THIBAUT KINDER, ‘An Egyptian Story’
AN EGYPTIAN STORY
Size: 24 x 17 cm
Pages: 116
Published by Lendroit Editions, 2018
In 2014 Thibaut Kinder began collecting memory cards found in end of the line flea markets, on the Internet or in second hand electronics stores for his project “Exhumed photographs”. The arrival of digital processing and the increased storage capacity offered by memory cards like Secure Digital (SD) has transformed our way of taking pictures, making each us into apprentice photographers and more or less compulsive in our picture taking. These SD cards have been adapted to work with the multitude of devices that surround us and have become multi-purpose receptacles. Sébastien Leseigneur* considers them to be the “ideal data holdalls” in which we have a tendency to forget what we’ve stored. At the same time, like each word published on the Internet, each email sent, the smallest of our digital actions and gestures are archived and stockpiled willy- nilly and will stay that way, impervious to any possible erasure. After they have been passed through the proper software, the abandoned cards quickly and simply reveal their contents, deleted but not erased. In this way Thibaut Kinder has collected some 180,000 photographs to date. Exhuming photographs brings up questions of survival and memory or rather memories. By presenting these meticulously isolated and organized photos on Instagram or Tumblr – images that had normally been assigned to oblivion – Thibaut Kinder offers them an unexpected vital prolongation and whole new meanings.
An Egyptian Story brings together photographs chosen from among 14,640 shots. The pretext for a publication in the form of a bound edition makes it possible to oppose the continuous flux of social networks with another rhythm, one that each person can appropriate through their perusal of the work. Though they are drawn from 14 different SD cards, the photographs are in effect presented together in order to advance an alternative narrative. With respectful modesty Thibaut Kinder reveals a world through ashes of the unknown lives he has discovered and, through the vocabulary he uses to share a new and enigmatic story with us.