Quanshen / 全身

First edition of Quanshen / 全身 by Thomas Sauvin (2013)

First impression

Small format Fan sampler in a PVC box in as new condition 

Signed by Thomas Sauvin to last page

No markings to book

Some very slight markings to PVC box 

Published by Archive Of Modern Conflict

About

This publication gathers a selection of portraits made in Chinese studios between the thirties and the eighties. The full-length portrait, where the subject is shot head-to-toe in front of a specific background, is as old as portrait photography itself. But in the Chinese case, in order to cut the costs of this type of portrait, photo studios would offer a previously unseen vertical format, in which the frame restricted the subject to standing straight with its arms along the body. This resulted in a silver print, a sort of tiny photographic coffin, with an average size of 7 cm high by 2.5 cm wide, either black and white or hand-colored.  

Through these images, we don't discover individuals as they are, but as they wish to be perceived. Each of these portraits contain an element through which the subject asserts his place in society: the soldier and his gun, the sportswoman and her tennis racket, the nurse and her syringe, the revolutionary and his little red book, the peasant and his straw hat, the photographer and his camera, but also the modem woman and her pink purse...