Chinese Family Memories, Recycled

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When Thomas Sauvin shows his work to friends in Beijing who don’t study photography, they are often surprised, and a bit confused, by the pictures he collects. To them, they are familiar â€" and boring.

He understands that. After all, he found his collection in the arbage. Mr. Sauvin, an editor who has lived in Beijing for a decade, has amassed a collection from discarded negatives. The photos trigger familiar â€" if not fading â€" memories: a picture of a young girl on a red Xin Fu motorcycle, for instance (Slide 12), or a shot of a T-shirt that was popular in the early 1990s.

“Sometimes people don’t expect this from photography,” he said. “They want to travel from photography. They want to see things they’ve never seen. They want to see things with a new angle.”

That is not what Mr. Sauvin is seeking. He is working on “Silvermine,” a project that looks at hundreds of thousands of negatives, mostly personal and family photos, that have been rescued from Beijing’s trash. From so many different lives, he sees the same story time and again.

The beauty of the repetition found in the “Silvermine” photos â€" subjects standing still, at a distance, often in the center of the frame â€" comes out in an animation produced by LeiLei, a Chinese artist who teamed with Mr. Sauvin, sewing the pictures together at a rate of about eight per second. The same pose, and the same setting, appear over and over, from people perching on a Ronald McDonald statue to proud stances at major destinations.

The project, which will appear next week at London’s Format International Photography Festival, started when Mr. Sauvin and the Archive of Modern Conflict, the collector and publisher for which he works, wanted to explore more “vernacular material,” like photo albums, hand-colored photographs and studio photographs. He thought it would be interesting to look at negatives, because amateur photographers often throw them away.

In 2009, searching online for information about buying and collecting negatives, Mr. Sauvin kept seeing the name Xiao Ma on Chinese Web forums. Mr. Xiao ecycled trash containing silver nitrates â€" including, but not limited to, negatives. The two met at a recycling zone north of Beijing, amid a large compound of brick buildings dedicated to different categories of castoffs. Mr. Xiao’s warehouse was filled with trash, from which he extracted silver nitrate to sell to laboratories.

“It kind of broke my heart into many pieces,” Mr. Sauvin said, “And I just naturally told him, ‘You buy this by the kilo â€" just send it to me by the kilo, 10 times the price.’ ”

Now, Mr. Sauvin visits once every month or two, returning to his office with a load of negatives that he examines on his light table. Typically, he scans about 80 percent of them.

At first, he was seeking “the impossible shot,” he said. He didn’t find it. After going through about 10,000 images, he realized that the task wasn’t about finding perfection.

“There’s a big amount of very, very boring images,” said Mr. Sauvin, who looks at each one thr! ee or fou! r times. But, he said, “a few images can stand out and wake you up, and that’s a good way to proceed, I think.”

Thomas Sauvin/Silvermine

Most of the photos are “three, two, one” shots â€" pictures of subjects standing completely still, looking straight into the lens. The pictures lack spontaneity, but they feel intimate in a way.

The archive covers a short period, about 20 years from 1985 to 2005, when the digital camera and mobile photography started taking over. Most of the pictures do not have precise dates, but by studying hairstyles and fashion, as well as damage to the negatives, Mr. Sauvin can place them within a period of a few years. It helps that they come in sets, meaning he can use context, like a calendar on a wall or a street sign, to glean details about the photogapher.

Mr. Sauvin doesn’t see many changes in the aesthetics of the pictures over the years. But he sees societal shifts. In the 1980s, film was accessible but still expensive, so people were taking pictures of so-called Kodak moments â€" babies being born, family gatherings, visits to Tiananmen Square.

As photography popularized and the quality of living increased for many Chinese, the images changed. “You feel like it’s not the father taking pictures anymore,” Mr. Sauvin said. “The kids are starting to take pictures, as well.”

From more than half a million negatives, Mr. Sauvin has begun to see the images thematically. There is the refrigerator series: as more Chinese households began acquiring refrigerators in the late 1980s, women posed with their new appliances. And the Marilyn Monroe series, showing posters of the blond bombshell inside people’s homes.

He hasn’t seen many photos of Chinese families going abroad in the 1980s. In the 90s, Thailand becomes a! common d! estination â€" so common that Mr. Sauvin can describe the path the photos will take, concluding with a picture on the flight home.

Mr. Sauvin, 29, has yet to do similar work outside of China. He grew up in Paris looking at the photographs of Marc Riboud, whose son Theo was his childhood friend. “We were always going to his studio to steal a few postcards,” he said, including pictures Mr. Riboud shot in China, where he began traveling in the late 1950s.

Years later, in 2006, Mr. Sauvin took a job working as an assistant for the French curator Alain Jullien at the Lianzhou International Photo Festival in Guangdong Province. There, he met the director of the Archive of Modern Conflict, where he has been a consultant, collecting contemporary Chinese photography, since 2006.

Mr. Sauvin plans to keep working on “Silvermine” as long as there are negatives to be found. “It makes sense, for this project, to eally witness the death of film photography in China,” he said. “It wouldn’t really make sense to stop now.”

He sees his work as a counterpoint to the usual - and often negative - coverage about China in the foreign press and on Chinese social media.

“It starts with birth, it ends with death,” he said of the collection. “It talks a bit about love. People go to the beach. People travel. They take blurry pictures, their negatives eventually get damaged. They are at home with posters of Marilyn Monroe. They have their photo shot with their refrigerator.”

It’s about life.

Thomas Sauvin/Silvermine

Thomas Sauvin’s “Silvermine” photos will appear at the Format Internatio! nal Photo! graphy Festival in London, which begins next week. Emiland Guillerme produced a short documentary about “Silvermine.”

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