Hand-colored

Collaboration with Lei Lei
Date: 2016

In 2013, Lei Lei and Thomas Sauvin collected number of black-and-white photos from Chinese flea markets and imagined that all of them belonged to one fictional Chinese person. Through rendering, collage, and a cyclical process of hand coloring, scanning, and printing, they created connections among the photos. They spent two years repeating this process. These 1168 hand-colored photos invoke the passage of time, injecting life into the imaginary protagonist as he ventures through time and space.

2013年，雷磊和苏文从中国跳蚤市场收集了大量的黑白照片，并将一个虚构的中国人形象架构在这些照片上。通过不断渲染、拼贴、手工上色、扫描和印刷，他们在这些照片之间建立了联系。他们花了两年时间重复这个过程。这1168张手工着色照唤起了时间的流逝，为构想出的主人公在时空中的冒险注入了生命。

"It Never Has To End: The Photographic Image in Transition with Thomas Sauvin and Lei Lei." Text by Brad Feuerhelm

"Each octave or state of the image has contributed to a new potential or opened a discussion of photography that is often overlooked”…
“照片的每一层状态改变都触发了新的潜能，开启了常被忽视的摄影讨论”。

Anachronisms are often a difficult aesthetic concept to consider when the future is written largely by the velocity and speed of technological change. How do we examine material economies of visual means from the past while also trying to apply them to the future present? Artist Thomas Sauvin and Artist Lei Lei have given us the keys to exchanging the past for a new document of the future by the appropriation of found material and intervening the two formal technological elements simultaneously at odds with each other in photographic conceptual framework-the hand applied colorization of vintage photography and animation.
Animation by its very process is conditioned to short steps of change that alter our perception of an image from its genesis to its enduring finality. Each movement or change to an image becomes one small part of the overwhelming final product. All moments in between are captured as a procedural dialectic when examined in the context of the finished work. To trace the movements becomes the whole itself.

Thomas Sauvin’s is widely celebrated for projects that examine the great reclamation of disused Chinese photographs and negatives that were previously destined towards the dustbin of history had he not salvaged their them and their potential. His collection itself is now considered a full-blown project for his own practice, not simply an archive. This is to be considered collecting as practice. It is the same for this project, though the archaeological implications are from sourcing existing images and not negatives that had lost their home and are placed on the market to be salvaged from loss by his hand. That there is an implicit potential for sacrosanct horror in loss is also worth acknowledging. The loss of hundreds of thousands of Chinese images, stripped of their silver nitrate or homes would become a great act of iconoclasm of an entire people if the process had been left to its final ends of dismissal in the festering trash heap. Sauvin’s intervention in saving these images not only provides his own practice with considerable fodder, but also breathes new life into the potential of what has been saved and what becomes re-purposed.
The keystone of the project “Hand-Colored Photography” began when Sauvin, sifting through a batch of newly-saved images found a photograph that bore the annotations of its short history-“taken in 58’, colored in 68’” on the back of the physical image. Sauvin recognized instantly the profundity of this photographic relic- namely that its “life” was always in transition so long as it existed. He understood that the value of a photograph being made in 1958, but improved upon with hand-coloring in 1968, enhanced the photograph’s value, representation and quality over time to which he could also inscribe his own ideas or mark to the original image thus continuing its life and transition. To “make it better later” is an idea that promotes that not all images are finished once printed or archived.

当未来在很大程度上是由技术变革的速度和范畴来书写的时候，“不合时宜”往往是一个难以思索的美学概念。我们如何审视视觉下往日的物质经济，以及如何尝试将其应用于当下的未来？艺术家苏文和艺术家雷磊通过对拾得材料的挪用，并将两种形式上天差地别的技术同时引入摄影概念框架——老照片和动画的手工着色，向我们展示了如何将过去转换成未来的文献。
动画通过其本身的过程，从开头到的结尾, 经由细微处的变化改变我们对一张照片的认知。照片的每一处改动都会成为终版巨制的一部分。当回看最终完成的作品时，中间的所有时刻都被捕捉为过程辩证法。追踪这些运动即汇聚成了整体。

苏文的作品因其对废弃的中国照片和底片的回收而广为人知，这些照片和底片如果没有他的挽救，注定要被历史抛弃。如今，收藏这个行为本身已然成了他躬身其中的成熟项目，而不单指涉档案库。收藏就是这个项目的一部分，虽然考古学的意义来自于现存的收藏照片，而不是那些在市场上被他拯救回来的已被抛弃的无主底片。同样得承认，这种毁灭里隐含着极度的恐怖。几十万张被丢弃，被损毁以提炼硝酸银的中国照片，如果在任由其在溃烂在污秽的垃圾堆中，对整个人类而言无疑是一场圣像损毁。苏文着手拯救这些图像，不仅为自己的艺术实践提供了相当多的素材，也为被拯救回来、循环利用的东西注入了新的活力。
"手工着色"项目源自一个偶然的观看瞬间。当苏文在筛选一批收来的照片时，发现一张照片的背面写有简短的历史注释——“58年拍摄”，”68年上色"。苏文马上意识到了这个摄影遗迹背后的深刻——即只要它存在，它的"生命"就始终处于转变中。他明白，一张于1958年拍摄，却于1968年通过手工上色进行改进的照片，其价值、代表性、质量都随着时间的推移而被提高了，他还可以在原始照片上刻上自己的想法或标记，从而延续其生命和转变。"越来越好"是一种理念，提倡并不是所有的影像一经印刷或存档就终结了。

Observing that the anachronism of such an image at its base was strife for further change, Sauvin enlisted Beijing-based friend and multimedia artist Lei Lei to work on creating a series of animations in which the original photograph could be enhanced through technology and the hand of the artist. Documenting each step of the hand-coloring process by scanning each change, sometimes over hundreds of progressive scans and coloring, the duo turned the resulting moments or stages into animation and gave the images a transcendent possibility not inherent in their original condition, thus continuing its life. Within re-contextualizing these individual images, the artists have created a fictional narrative not found in each errant individual image.
By conditioning the image to hand-coloring first, the artists consciously developed a methodology in which they could make the image move and progress in step-moments by additive color process. This should be underscored. The image in flux and the image in transition is a neglected idea in general photographic practice. The spectatorship of the moving image is almost always aligned with the transition to film. The step that is often missed is how to make an image move by from its initial physical object-hood into something greater than itself procedurally without turning towards the necessarily cinematic. In coloring the images and then taking each step through the scanning and animation process to the final product, the artists have re-invigorated photography and more importantly, THE photograph’s potential for evolution. Each octave or state of the image has contributed to a new potential or opened a discussion of photography that is often overlooked for the potential of film itself. These images breathe and they sweat a neo-fauvist color palette and their new intention continues to transcend that of the static repository for which they have been destined.

苏文观察到照片背后的时空错位的冲突在于进一步的改变，于是他邀请北京的朋友和多媒体艺术家雷磊来创作一系列的动画，通过技术和艺术家的手来提升原始照片的效果。通过扫描记录上色过程中的每一步变化，有时经过上百次的渐进式扫描和着色，二人将由此产生的瞬间或阶段转化为动画，并赋予图像一种原始状态下所不具备的超越可能性，从而延续其生命。在对这些个体图像进行重新语境化的过程中，艺术家们创造了一种在每一个偏离的个体图像中所没有的虚构叙事。
通过先将画面调成手工着色，艺术家们有意识地发展了一种方法，在这种方法，他们可以通过加色过程使画面在一步步的瞬间移动和进步。这一点应该强调。变化中的影像和过渡中的影像是一般摄影实践中被忽视的观念。动态影像的观赏性几乎都与胶片的过渡相一致。往往被忽略的一步是如何使一个图像从最初的物理对象性，在程序上进入比自身更大的东西，而不转向必然的电影性。在给图像上色，然后通过扫描和动画制作过程中的每一步，到最终的产品，艺术家们重新激发了摄影的活力，更重要的是，激发了照片的进化潜力。每一个八度或影像的状态都为摄影贡献了一种新的潜力，或者开启了对摄影的讨论，而这种讨论往往被忽略了胶片本身的潜力。这些影像会呼吸，它们挥洒着新浮世绘主义的色彩，而它们的新意向也在不断地超越它们所注定的静态存储库。