Saint-Louis Foundry

A collection of scans of the original images is on view here: http://saintlouisfoundry.tumblr.com


June 2012 I found a warehouse in Saint-Louis, Alsace, France, apparently taken over by a group of outlaws. They used the giant hall as a sort of activist gathering venue, a radical space, a location for performative actions, collecting and destroying, breaking, burning remains, shattered accessories of ordinary lives — creating an installation mostly of anti-capitalist, anarchistic gestures, setting small-time life on a ridiculing pedestal, all the while being connoted to political and financial issues and general reflections on the human condition.

Within these heavily symbolic settings I found a set of fairly innocent holiday photographs laying on the floor. All of them were marked by the developing personnel to indicate their faultiness — with a stroke of a black crayon. The development of these pictures is usually free of charge as they are considered worthless by decision of the personnel. By their terms, these pictures do not meet the quality standards of a picture.