Discarded photo negatives show China in an era of change
For
the last decade, Thomas Sauvin has been purchasing discarded color
negatives by the kilogram from a recycling plant outside Beijing. The
old 35-millimeter films capture family outings, weddings, birthdays,
vacations -- anonymous, everyday memories that would otherwise be lost.
The trader
he buys them from, Xiao Ma, usually dissolves the negatives in acid,
alongside hospital X-rays and old CD-ROMs, in order to extract the small
amount of silver within. But instead, Sauvin takes them away in big
rice sacks to find out what else they contain.
Quite
how the negatives found their way into people's trash remains a mystery
to the French collector and artist. But with the help of a local
technician, he scans them in batches before adding the images to his
archive.
His
ongoing "Beijing Silvermine" project paints a compelling picture of a
country undergoing profound change. The collection -- which comprises
850,000 photos -- offers an ordinary perspective on life in China that
is often overlooked, said Sauvin, who lived in Beijing for over 12
years.
"The
way China was depicted through contemporary photography, propaganda and
journalism (offered) a portrait far from the one I was witnessing," he
said in a phone interview. "There was something more universal,
something about collective memories, that started emerging. The photos
show a side of China that was never really exported to the West."
While
the resulting images can be, at times, inexplicably surreal (an old man
standing in a cacti bush, or a woman posing next to a fake shark), they
are often mundane. Yet, after spending a year and half "looking for
gems," Sauvin realized that the strength of his archive lay not in
occasional humorous discoveries, but in the bigger picture that emerged.
Most
of the images were taken between 1985 and the mid-2000s, when the
widespread adoption of digital cameras made film largely obsolete. It
was a time of rapid economic development, and the photos show how this
played out in people's lives: families posing with new household
appliances or standing with statues of Ronald McDonald after fast food
arrived in China in the early 1990s.
The
pictures also document people's changing relationship with the medium
of photography, as cameras went from expensive luxuries to everyday
items.
"I
have one (roll of) film -- 36 images -- that was shot over
three-and-a-half years," Sauvin said. "You have three consecutive
birthdays of the same person. You can imagine, on very important
occasions, the parents would bring out this analog camera, take one
photo and then wait six months before taking another one.
"But
by 2005, as analog photography becomes (more affordable), you notice
that people would go to somewhere like the Summer Palace and take 36
photos in 30 minutes."
Recurring themes
What
remains consistent throughout this period, however, is the pictures'
composition and what Sauvin calls "the ritual" of photography. Almost
all of the images show subjects standing at the center and looking out
to the camera.
Some common
themes also emerge: women posing with flowers, twins dressed in
identical clothing and people interacting with statues or public
sculptures. Indeed, the collector found so many photos of people smoking
at weddings (Chinese brides would often light cigarettes for male
guests as thanks for their attendance) that he was able to publish an
entire book of them.
New
ideas constantly emerge from the collection. Sauvin's latest exhibition
brings together photos from a Beijing amusement park filled with
miniature replicas of famous world monuments, from the Kremlin to the
Eiffel Tower. Opened in 1993, Beijing World Park encouraged visitors to
collect a stamp from each landmark in a mock passport ("Go around the
world in just one day," its catalog boasted).
What
initially appears as a vintage oddity, however, tells a wider story
about the country's rise. The exhibition juxtaposes photos of people
next to replica landmarks with those of Chinese tourists in front of the
real thing. In doing so, he explores how an evident curiosity about the
outside world was satiated by the newfound income to holiday around the
world.
"It
seems to be quite a meaningful place," Sauvin said of Beijing World
Park, which remains open to this day. "It was like an educational place
for people to start understanding what traveling and tourism was all
about."
Fading memories
Sauvin
has become adept at deciphering where, and in what circumstances, old
photos may have been taken. But it took seven years for a subject to
ever identify themselves in one of his pictures.
The
image in question depicts a middle-aged man laid out on rocks beside a
lake ("like a mermaid," as the collector put it). It was a personal
favorite of Sauvin's, and thus had appeared in exhibitions, posters,
flyers and even as a sticker. Indeed, he had spent so much time looking
at the man's image that he "knew the guy like he was my grandfather."
After
Sauvin posted the photo on China's Twitter-like microblogging platform,
Weibo, a user recognized the subject as his ex-girlfriend's father.
Some messages later, the artist met the man at a Beijing restaurant in
2016 -- almost 30 years after the photo was taken by colleagues at an
engineering conference.
"He
was very happy, and we had a very good time," Sauvin said. "In the end,
I offered him a framed copy of the photo and he asked me to sign it. He
looked at his wife and said, 'In a couple of years that's going to be
worth a lot of money!'"
Although
now based in Paris, Sauvin still visits Beijing four or five times a
year. The recycler Xiao Ma calls whenever he has recovered enough
negatives for a 50-kilogram bag. The price has almost tripled in the
decade since the project began, rising from 28 yuan ($4) a kilogram to a
"still very reasonable" 75 yuan (just under $11).
"It's
always a bit of a gamble, because sometimes a 50-kilo bag only comes
from one source -- and if that source isn't interesting, then I've just
spent 400 Euros," he said. "But that's part of the game, I suppose."
The
supply of negatives may soon run dry. Xiao extracts the most silver
from X-rays, but Sauvin said that Chinese hospitals have gone digital,
making the trade far less lucrative. But Sauvin also sources negatives
from eBay-like websites and visits flea markets, which is where he
stumbled across his latest project: old prints hidden in a plastic bag.
"I asked the vendor if I could open it and check inside," Sauvin recalled. "And he said, 'No, you have to buy it.'"
He
took the risk. After parting with around 450 yuan ($64), Sauvin looked
inside to reveal a series of black-and-white photos depicting athletes
mid-leap, their gravity-defying poses assuming an almost sculptural
quality.
Sauvin's latest project brings together found photos of athletes from a single day in 1960. Credit: Courtesy Thomas Sauvin
Further
investigation revealed that the pictures had been taken by the
photography department at Xi'an Physical Education University, in
China's Shaanxi province. All had been shot in a single day in June 1960
-- at the height of Mao's Great Leap Forward, the disastrous
modernization campaign that plunged the country into economic chaos and
famine.
"I've
never managed to find a significant number of photos from this era.
People were obviously not going to photo studios, because it was a very
hard time," said Sauvin, who has compiled the images into a new book,
"Great Leaps Forward."
"The photos were simply beautiful -- very calm, very poetic. The athletes seemed to overcome gravity,"
Sauvin's new book "Great Leaps Forward" is available now. "The World Park," is showing at the Institut pour la Photographie in Lille, France, until Dec. 15, 2019.
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