An Egyptian Story

Since 2014, Thibaut Kinder has been collecting SD cards found on markets from biffins, on the internet or in electronics stores used for his Exhumed Photographs project. The transition to digital and the storage capabilities offered by the Secure Digital card have transformed our way of taking pictures, in particular making each of us apprentice photographers – more or less compulsive. These SD cards, adapted to the The multitude of devices that surround us become receptacles for vocations multiples. 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 every digital action are archived, kept willingly or unwillingly, beyond any deletion. After running through data recovery software, the cards abandoned quickly and easily reveal their data, deleted but not deleted. Thibaut Kinder has thus collected nearly 180,000 photos to date. Exhuming these photographs raises the question of the survival of memory – of memories. By presenting rigorously isolated and then reordered shots previously, on Instagram or Tumblr, photos initially condemned 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 clichés. The pretext of a publication in the form of a book allows us to oppose to the continuous flow of social networks another rhythm, which everyone can appropriate to the consultation of the work. If they come from 14 cards Different SD, the photographs are in fact arranged here in such a way as to to propose a more articulated narrative. Thibaut Kinder reveals to the world, always with modesty, fragments of unknown lives, vocabulary that he uses to tell us a new enigmatic story.