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Intimate lost photos rescued from a recycling plant show a changing Bejiing

Photos Thomas Sauvin/Beijing Silvermine
Photos Thomas Sauvin/Beijing Silvermine

Artist Thomas Sauvin has plenty of pictures to show for his 12 years of living in Beijing.

Unusually though, none of them show Sauvin himself. Instead, his archive of over 850,000 images offers a peek into the everyday lives of Chinese citizens over the 20th century and into the new millennium, and, simultaneously, the sweeping social and economic change that occurred during that time.

The French expat has spent the last 10 years buying 35mm negatives from a recycling plant outside Beijing, hauling away dusty negatives in rice sacks to painstakingly examine, develop and archive them.

Named Beijing Silvermine – the negatives were intended to be dissolved to extract the trace amounts of silver in each strip – the archive takes us inside the lives of ordinary people, from babies’ first steps to weddings and day trips. Over the years, the mise en scène shifts: fridges, motorbikes and TVs are proudly shown off, before McDonald's and Microsoft logos proliferate as China opens up to the wider world.

Sauvin has noticed specific themes and aesthetic choices from these late 20th century photos.

Swinging in Beijing: one of the photos from Sauvin's archive (Thomas Sauvin/Beijing Silvermine)
Swinging in Beijing: one of the photos from Sauvin's archive (Thomas Sauvin/Beijing Silvermine)

They range from the predictable – women posing besides flowers – to the bizarre; groups smoking cigarette bongs at weddings, people posing on giant, kitsch statues, twins positioned next to twin objects to create an uncanny symmetry. Beguiling, funny and moving, the Beijing Silvermine archive has spawned international exhibitions and a number of photo books.

China dolls: four dancers at a sports university (Thomas Sauvin/Beijing Silvermine)
China dolls: four dancers at a sports university (Thomas Sauvin/Beijing Silvermine)

The images in his latest photo book, Great Leaps Forward, are a selection of 300 black-and-white photos found in an anonymous plastic bag, salvaged from a Beijing flea market in 2016. Inside, Sauvin found his only pictures from China’s Great Leap Forward, the period between 1958 and 1962 in which the new communist regime attempted to initiate sweeping agricultural reforms, leading to famine. The pictures, taken at a sports university in 1960, seem to reflect the dreams that drove the deadly reforms; the athletes are caught mid leap, young and perfect, throwing themselves towards a new vision of the future.

Great Leaps Forward is out now, published by Silvermine