Music
We are in Beijing's suburbs.
Thomas Sauvain, a Frenchman who has been in China for almost 10 years,
has been collecting images.
Every month, he travels in this zone of illegal recycling.
Plastic, metal, paper, all kinds of waste end here.
Thomas is interested in one thing, the photo negatives.
A few hours later, we are here at Xiaoma,
a clandestine recycler who runs the camera.
In his warehouse, he recovers all the money he has.
So here is what he collects, most of the radiographies.
Negatives used to print books and catalogs.
In fact, he will dump all that in an acid tank,
and after a few days, he will collect the silver nitrate.
So he will recover a black powder that will sell to chemists.
And if I understood correctly, it is a product that allows to test some chemical reactions.
His reserve is constantly provided by rangers
for him on the whole province of Beijing.
A mine of materials for Thomas.
So here I have a lot of reunions,
a match of ping-pong,
everyday life,
I take good things.
It does not matter at the end of the images.
So it doesn't matter whether it is a broken column radiographies,
or whether it is 20 years of the life of a Chinese,
it does absolutely no difference.
He is convinced that they are perfect in banal,
and he is not totally wrong.
But precisely, that's what I like.
With the arrival of digital, the negatives become more and more rare.
They are yet the memory of ordinary Chinese
that Thomas recycles unrelenting for two years.
Do you remember?
Yes, I remember.
Vacation photos, family memories, friends' parties,
banal clichés, but they are rare.
The first public kodak in 1985 until digital,
which marks the end of the film in 2005,
none other than this period of profound change has been so well documented.
These photos show 20 years of history
being seen from the inside in the intimacy of ordinary Chinese.
This China, in 1985-2005, is the after-culture revolution.
It is the economic opening.
It is the China of the Parcatennes.
It is the China of karaoke.
It is the China of leisure.
It is the China of consumption.
We take the time to have fun.
We buy TVs, we buy cars.
We buy a fixed phone.
So it shows a China that has not really been shown in photos.
In photos.
Returning to the office, in the streets of the centre,
Thomas brings his precious butter.
Some negative things, too heavy, are inexhaustible.
Others are passed on to the magnifying glass on a luminous table.
The images of the films
are always the hope of falling on a cliff.
There is a large part of the excitement
that I can have to look at these images on a daily basis
that goes through this feeling of entering people's lives.
In 36 photos, we have the time to meet someone,
we have the time to meet a photographer.
We have clues.
We can know when, when, when, when,
we meet a photographer. We have clues.
We can know when the photos have been taken.
We can imagine if it is rather a man or a woman who took them.
If it is rather someone funny, rather someone boring,
rather someone strict, we learn a lot about the photographer.
And that, it is a project engine.
He tries, archives and selects everything.
Each board is numbered and stored in the reserve.
A work of ants, which over the years
allowed him to store more than half a million clichés.
A gigantic work.
He then sends the boards selected this year.
We go to Exia Wang.
Although he has been working together since the beginning of the project,
it is the first time that he will be at home,
in a remote area of ​​the city.
He numbers negatives all day long.
There is a lot of work that he has been working on for two years.
In a little over two years, he scanned
no more than 250 negatives,
because of 9,000 per month.
Sometimes he was helped by a friend to go to 18,000.
So he is there since the beginning.
All the images that are in this archive,
are passed between the hands.
A few weeks later,
a record of the complete image.
A cigarette, a few instructions,
a handful of hands,
and the courier leaves with another board to scan.
Thomas installs comfortably.
He finally discovers the photos he had taken at Exia Wang.
By looking at them,
groupings and series form in his mind.
It's always the same fountain.
You see?
This is in a park
that has a favorite cafe in the south of Beijing.
Always this cascade.
Cascade.
Cascade.
And this one, in fact, it's two winds,
but they had not yet put the system on the road.
And for the little anecdote,
she holds a bottle of water like that.
The accidental photos.
This one, anyway.
All the big walls photos, they are always super boring.
This one, it's beautiful,
someone is posing and passing it.
You like pigeons, huh?
I like pigeons.
I like agreements.
This work,
he does it with the help of Wang Lian,
his assistant.
She is here since the beginning and knows the archive well.
Wow.
So how do you look at these photos?
How do you look at this whole process?
Anyway, you want to say something,
you have to say something.
People who are old-fashioned
are now not involved in this area.
So this project,
in China,
is quite interesting
and certainly no one has done it before.
Generally, the harvesters may not notice these things.
They are probably more early,
some of the old pictures.
Thomas gives a new life to these clichés
by exposing them to international photo festivals.
The selection is constantly evolving
through the arrivals.
In the end,
there will be publications.
Not books,
but boxes
that will contain, without clichés,
selected randomly.
The goal would be to recreate a little bit of excitement
and the random character
that can be seen in a walk
where we receive a bag.
I would like to distance myself from an editing
where I try to tell a story,
to create a narration,
because I think this is something
that is done naturally.
But he also wants to make his collection
live through other views,
like that of Leilei,
a young Chinese artist
who is involved in revealing
his images of his country.
Together,
he prepares a film of animation
made from the archive.
Leilei comes to show him the first images of the project.
A few months and thousands of photos later,
here is the result.
A hypnotic journey
in China at the end of the 20th century.
They have released different series,
moments that are unmistakably photographed,
a pause that often comes back
like this posture in the middle of the frame,
or incontournable places,
like the place Tiananmen, for example.
If there is something that hit me,
it is maybe some uniformity in the images,
the feeling that,
in the end, it is maybe one person
who would have taken all these photos.
They often answer
to the same composition,
to the same balance,
to the same distance with the subject.
If there is a denominator
like all these images,
it is the complicity
that exists between the photographer
and the photographer's person.
Later, the ultimate recognition
for Thomas is Martin Parr,
a world reference of photography
that hits the door.
He is also a great collector.
He exposes his most rare photos
in museums.
And when he discovers
Thomas' project,
he only has a comment.
I understand. I have to pay the dinner now.
That's it. Over. That's it.
