From issue: #30 In at least one dream!
Danit Ariel, 8 May 2026
In 2024, Photoworks commissioned five poets to respond to photographic works in annual #31, Multi Multi, edited by Diane Smyth. One poet, Mitchell Robertson, was struck by The Future Without You by Max Pinckers & Thomas Sauvin. The work repurposes rescued transparencies of 1990s stock photography which Sauvin found in a recycling centre in Beijing. The duo selected representations of corporate business from the archive of 50,000 transparencies, highlighting their view of stock photography as the most capitalist form of imagery. This rang true for Robertson too, who was particularly irked by the image below. At the time, he shared his frustration with shiny characters who promise everything and mean nothing. Both image and poem are about saying things exactly as they are. In the image, the figure plasters on a shameless, sparkly smile; whatever he is presenting is God-given enough to have a halo around it. All the bright colours are reflected in the poem’s smooth, charismatic words that don’t even try to hide their intentions. The man Robertson tells us about in true Glaswegian flair is the same man in the image, the same man we’ve all met before. Yet the poem invites us in for a pint to commiserate together with just enough humour and heart to wash away our own experiences of big bad bosses.
Max Pinckers (1988, BE) grew up in Indonesia, India, Australia and Singapore, and is currently based in Brussels, where he was born. His work challenges the conventions of documentary photography by exploring theatricality, performativity and collaboration, made visible through the explicit use of cinematic lighting and staging in a documentary context. Photography, for Pinckers, is a speculative gesture that involves more than the mere representation of external realities. His approach to reality and truth is plural, and open to articulation in different ways.
Thomas Sauvin is a French photography collector and editor. Sauvin started Beijing Silvermine in 2009, gathering discarded negatives in a Chinese recycling centre. This archive is now one of the biggest in China. He has published numerous books and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago and the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Mitchell Robertson is an actor, writer and filmmaker from Cumbernauld in Scotland. Carried by a narrative driven style, Mitchell’s written work explores class and masculinity, with a strong focus on story in an attempt to delineate where things often begin and where they end. Some of his poetry performance credits include The Roundhouse and La Poste Rodier in Paris. On screen, you can see him most recently in the new HBO/BBC drama Half Man.
