An Egyptian Story / Thibaut Kinder

Thibaut Kinder has been collecting, since 2014, SD cards found on biffins markets, on the internet or in second-hand electronic equipment stores for his project Exhumed photographs. The transition to digital and the storage capacities offered by the Secure Digital card have transformed the way we take photos, in particular by making each of us apprentice photographers – more or less compulsive. These SD cards, adapted to the multitude of devices that surround us, become receptacles with multiple vocations. Sébastien Leseigneur describes them as the “ideal catch-all data”, on which we tend to forget what we put there. But, like every word published on the Internet, every email sent, our smallest digital acts and gestures are archived, kept willy-nilly and beyond any deletion. After passing through data recovery software, abandoned cards quickly and simply reveal their data, deleted but not erased. Thibaut Kinder has collected nearly 180,000 photos to date. Exhuming these photographs raises the question of the survival of memory – of memories. By presenting rigorously isolated shots then reordered beforehand, on Instagram or Tumblr, shots initially doomed to oblivion, Thibaut Kinder offers them an unexpected extension and a whole new meaning. An Egyptian Story brings together photographs selected from some 14,640 shots. The pretext of a publication in the form of a book makes it possible to oppose the continual flow of social networks with another rhythm, which everyone can appropriate when consulting the book. If they come from 14 different SD cards, the photographs are indeed here arranged in such a way as to offer a more articulated narration. Thibaut Kinder reveals to the world, always with modesty, snippets of unknown lives, a vocabulary he uses to tell us a new enigmatic story.

English