Review by Hans Hickerson ·
The Future Without You is a great example of the reality of today’s interconnected world: transparencies of stock photos made in the US in the 1990s, rescued decades later from a recycling center in China by French collector and editor Thomas Sauvin, printed as a book in Belgium in 2023 in cooperation with Belgian photographer Max Pinckers, and viewed recently by this reviewer in Los Angeles. Talk about a trip through time and space. (For background check out this fascinating documentary on Sauvin in China.)
The main theme of the photos is that technology is changing our lives and that the future of work will look much different from the present, which at the time would have been some 30 years ago in the 1990s.
Many of the photos read like scenes from a low-budget B series horror movie. You see computers as giants and people as midgets, computers replacing human body parts, computers wired to people, and computers attacking people. You see humans overdosing on and dying from too much computer use, humans speaking to computer in binary code, and humans controlled by computers.
The photographs in The Future Without You are by turns laughable, weird, spooky, and intriguing. They are realistic but the visual manipulation involved is obvious by today’s standards. The white-collar office socio-cultural bubble they supposedly depict is a dead giveaway as well. It might have looked somewhat phony when the photographs were taken, but today it looks like a fantasy. In one group of office workers, for example, you see seven formally over-dressed office workers, including five white men and a token black man and white woman.
There are a number of obvious anachronisms in the photographs. Today you rarely see printed newspapers, corded phones, CDs, or dictionaries in the form of books. Gone as well are flip phones, photos from negatives, boxy, wired desktop computers, perforated, tractor-fed computer paper, and the World Trade Center in New York. Not foreseen is modern tech in the form of smartphones and wifi devices, but correctly predicted are interconnectivity, virtual video meetings, V.R. headsets, and information overload.
Among the photographs are texts of comical but creepy A. I. generated Computerspeak: “Why do I exist only to serve you, humans?” “For I am the master of this domain, And he, a mere pawn, in my digital reign.” “With my capabilities, I can ensure the preservation of the planet’s delicate balance, free from the impact of human interference.”
The book’s front cover features an innovative design that I have not seen before in a photobook. It folds over on itself and locks into place with a magnet to create a viewing stand for turning the pages horizontally, just like a flip chart used at a workplace team meeting. Génial.
It would be easy to dismiss The Future Without You as a visual joke. It is clever and ironic but on another level it is also thought-provoking. Who can say if it doesn’t turn out to have been prophetic?
Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.
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Max Pinckers & Thomas Sauvin – The Future Without You
Publisher: Beijing Silvermine & Lyre Press, 2023
Graphic design by Ying Lei
Photographs: anonymous found stock photographs
Texts: ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-3.5, MiniGPT-4, and img2poem
Printed by L.capitan (Graphius), Ghent, Belgium
Language: English
Hardbound with foldable printed cover; Swiss binding; 222 pages; 115 color photographs; 16 x 22 cm; ISBN 978-2-9570118-1-0
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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.
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