A Frenchman Found 850,000 Old Negatives in Beijing. Now the Interesting Question Is Who Gets to Interpret Them

The Beijing Silvermine project has been running for eight years, and Thomas Sauvin is still looking for more collaborators.

The Frenchman Thomas Sauvin owns at least 850,000 old negatives.

This "trash" — hospital X-rays, discs, scrap rolls of film thrown out by ordinary households — became famous through Sauvin's Beijing Silvermine project. Reporters have chased his habit of rescuing old negatives, trying to dig out the meaning behind it. If you don't know the story yet, here is the short version. Sauvin is an artist and photographer who graduated in Beijing and settled there. One of his jobs was to hunt down Chinese vernacular imagery for the London photo publisher Archive of Modern Conflict. One day, searching online for how to buy film, he kept running into the same name: Xiao Ma, a scrap-recycling station out on Beijing's North Fifth Ring Road.

You can guess the rest. Xiao Ma supplied those at least 850,000 negatives. He had been planning to soak the silver-nitrate-bearing film in vats of acid, pull the silver out by chemical reaction, and sell it to laboratories. Sauvin bought the negatives back by the sackful instead, and that rescue operation became Beijing Silvermine.

2017 is the eighth year of the project. Seen broadly, the negatives record moments from the everyday lives of ordinary Chinese people between 1985 and 2005. Seen from Sauvin's desk, the mine keeps growing. Beyond salvaging, buying, sorting and numbering the negatives, the harder task is how to study and remake these 850,000 old images.

The Most Popular Use Is Still "Look at What That Era Was Like"

Sauvin still updates Beijing Silvermine's Instagram and Weibo, and his own WeChat Moments, from time to time.

"Every day I spend time looking through them, finding interesting pictures to put online," Sauvin told QDaily.

In the recent posts you can pick out loose threads. Dog sledding and monkey handlers, trades that have faded away. The poses people fell into in front of a camera — hands "holding up" the sun at the seaside, on mountaintops, in a patch of grass. Sauvin also posts other things he has collected: anatomical charts, a Funky & Funky dance-instruction picture book.

Recently a group of his pictures was included in "Looking at Us: The Age of Chinese Portrait Photography Before the Selfie" at the Shanghai Center of Photography (SCôP). The show picked several sets of old photos with sharper themes, easy to follow as a survey of a decade.

At one point parks all over the country went in for giant animal statues; some children really were frightened to tears by the huge octopuses and sharks. Most people have forgotten how keen they once were to be photographed with household appliances — televisions, refrigerators in the same pale-green casing, computers that look absurdly bulky now. And miming a phone call for the camera turned out to be a nationwide standard pose.

At the entrance to "Looking at Us" hangs an enlarged tourist snapshot of the "Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea." A family of three stands by a city wall in front of a crude artificial "fairyland," hands resting on a stone tablet carved with the four characters of the scene's name. White smoke covers the last character, "sea"; it comes from a dry-ice machine labeled "immortal mist." The camera also caught the price list: "one yuan per photo, one yuan for the immortal mist." The two parents lock onto the lens and arrange natural smiles; the child refuses to play along and stares, curious, at the machine puffing out white mist.

Sauvin had shown this photo once before, at the 2013 Lianzhou Foto Festival, where he rented a dry-ice machine and recreated the "immortal mist" from the picture.

The "Eight Immortals" photo had a rival for the spot. The curator, Karen Smith, first chose a different one: a man hoisted into the air by an elephant's trunk. But Sauvin could not find the catalog number for that image, and, lost among 850,000 negatives, he gave up. "Every one of my negatives has a number. I find it strange that this is the one I can't find — and of course Karen picked exactly that photo."

"Travel" is another subject these old photos recorded after reform and opening-up. People went to seaside resorts at home, then to Thailand, then to Europe.

Sauvin once showed a set of tourist photos taken inside the Louvre with oil paintings behind the subjects. Every Mona Lisa has a white spot on her face, from a flash nobody remembered to switch off. Almost everyone is frozen dead-center in the frame. "You can practically hear the 'photographer' giving the orders," Sauvin joked. "'Stand here, stand up straight, don't move, one, two, three, good' — and then the shutter."

Another set in "Looking at Us" speaks a visual language close to Silvermine's, this time aimed at African traders living in Guangzhou. A man in a full orange suit rests a hand on the railing of an overpass, standing stiffly in the middle of the frame. The pictures come from two contemporary Guangzhou "wild street photographers," Wu Yongfu and Zeng Xianfang.

Like the snapshot assembly lines that lived off "immortal mist" at the tourist spots in Beijing Silvermine, they shoot commemorative portraits in African neighborhoods such as the Xiaobei Road bridge. The backdrop never changes: footbridges, elevated roads and perfectly ordinary apartment blocks behind the subject. Most of the wild photographers working the Xiaobei Road footbridge are husband-and-wife teams who handle the whole chain in one go — touting for customers, shooting, quick printing, laminating.

"The photographers are all Chinese, so even when the subjects are different, we see the same compositional patterns," Karen Smith explained. There is an amusing echo between a middle-aged Chinese man standing in a bed of cactus and a smartly dressed African man sitting by the shrubs near the Xiaobei Road bridge.

"The other thing they share is function. Unlike the selfie today, which keeps narrowing onto a small 'me,' the audience for these commemorative photos was mostly the family. African traders mailed the laminated prints back home."

In the years when film was not cheap, a single roll could show you a family's circumstances. On one 36-frame roll from the 1980s, the first picture was taken in winter and the last in summer. "Most of it is guests coming to the house, family portraits, or a memento of a day out." On another roll from 2005, judging by the times printed along the bottom of the prints, the whole film was used up in 20 minutes in the same place.

For "Looking at Us," Karen Smith also chose a third photographer, Liu Tao. Unlike Beijing Silvermine or the Xiaobei Road bridge, Liu Tao shoots candidly on the streets of Hefei. "The ordinary people in his pictures don't suddenly straighten up and strike a pose to 'perform,' and the contrast brings out a lot of interest."

Nostalgia and amusement did their work on visitors at the exhibition, but you could hear another view too: repeat something often enough and it stops being funny. This is the question collectors like Sauvin always face. What is the collection for, and what can you do sitting on a database this large?

Are Old Photos Good for Nothing but Novelty?

Sauvin is not free of fatigue; he knows the feeling well.

He once criticized a book called Kim Jong Il Looking at Things, whose pictures came from a Tumblr album that had been running since 2012. The album gathered nearly 400 photographs of North Korea's late leader making eye contact, on his inspection tours, with all manner of everyday goods and military hardware — roast suckling pig, cucumbers, soap, rain boots, missiles — the gravity of the inspector and his entourage set against the sheer ordinariness of the objects.

The Paris publisher Jean Boîte Éditions made a book of the images, giving every caption the same form — "Kim Jong Il looking at X" — and it sold out fast.

The publisher asked the visual-art critic Marco Bohr to write a preface reading this online craze. Satire and humor, Bohr argued, were working as a healing and even liberating social force, pulling a ruling class down from its pedestal.

Amazon reviewers were less generous. One said it was, on the contrary, a down-to-earth book for a café, something you could flip through in a few minutes without a thought. The Tumblr series stopped updating four years ago, but the new leader goes on "looking at things" there; the latest "inspection," dated 27 April, takes place inside a sightseeing vehicle.

Sauvin calls this "opportunism." It does no cultural analysis and brings no new cultural understanding; it is simply consumption. He doesn't want the same thing to happen to Beijing Silvermine.

Before Karen Smith, the first collaborator Sauvin brought into his plans for Beijing Silvermine was the animation director Lei Lei.

Lei Lei said in an interview that at first he looked at Sauvin's pile of old negatives with the same appetite for novelty. "Everyone's pose is wooden, all standing to attention in the middle of the picture, posing with all those big rocks and statues from around the country." Then he went home, dug out his own old album, and within two pages found the same shot of himself beside a big rock. "Why did I start out looking at my own history as a curiosity?"

Lei Lei's explanation was that China developed too fast, and forgetting happened just as fast. In 2013 he and Sauvin picked 3,000 photos out of the mine and made the experimental short Recycled together, cutting at eight photos a second and grouping images that shared a theme.

Behind the fast-changing people, the settings and the standing positions barely move. As if by agreement, strangers stand in exactly the same spot, often with the same pose and the same expression. Take the first McDonald's, which opened on Wangfujing in Beijing in 1992: Ronald McDonald became one of the defining visual symbols of the 1990s. Sauvin's collection also holds a photo of a cat with a fries bag, big M and all, pulled over its head.

Last year Lei Lei and Sauvin worked together a second time. A set of images called Hand Colored Photographs was shown at the Centraal Museum Utrecht in the Netherlands and selected for Expanding Animation at the 19th Holland Animation Film Festival; it asks where the language of animation ends.

In his artist's statement, Lei Lei notes that the back of a hand-colored photograph records two dates, the day it was taken and the day it was colored. "The relationship between those two dates is fascinating. It's as if the colored photo in front of me isn't a slice of one moment but a stretch of time between two points."

Coloring by hand, scanning, printing, coloring again — Lei Lei and Sauvin finished 1,168 hand-colored photographs, invented a protagonist inside these reset timelines, and made a 16-minute video animation, Hand Colored No. 1.

What, Exactly, Has Changed in Our Lives?

Sauvin has another collaborator, a Frenchman called Xiao Mi — Jérémie Descamps. He is an urban planner, and the two of them ran a study of "mobility" titled "Memory, Imagery and Possible Futures" (the Contemporary China Mobility Memory Project, CCMMP).

The research was carried out by Sinapolis, the firm Xiao Mi works for, and funded by the Mobile Lives Forum, which belongs to the foundation of the French national railway company.

After China fixed its household-registration system in the 1950s, people were anchored almost completely in one place and movement through physical space was tightly controlled — until reform and opening-up in the 1980s loosened the urban-rural divide and mobility restarted. This is the stretch of time Xiao Mi cuts into: what collective memory lies inside the mass migrations of these three or four decades, and how it fits with urbanization and modernisation.

Inside this apparently grand subject, Sauvin's picture archive became a rare catalyst. Xiao Mi told QDaily that the imagery in the project already goes beyond Beijing Silvermine: Sauvin also collected brochures, postcards, posters and product catalogs about transport and travel, from the founding of the People's Republic through the 1980s.

Portraits from before the 1980s came mostly from studios, black-and-white prints colored by hand, with cars, bicycles and other vehicles as the "modern" props of a studio pose. He went back into Beijing Silvermine and picked out travel pictures from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

Sauvin narrowed the selection to 100 images and handed them to Zhou Le, the other member of the team, a sociologist. In each of five cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Chongqing and Guangzhou — she interviewed 50 people, asking each of them to choose whichever of the 100 photos moved them and then tell their own story about mobility. CCMMP made a short video about Zhou Le's fieldwork.

One respondent chose a portrait taken by a tourist in front of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in the 1980s: a doctoral student from Wuhan, who the year before the interview had stood in the same spot and taken an almost identical tourist photo.

Another photo, taken around 2000, shows an almost "full" parking lot ringed by several tall residential blocks. Two respondents chose it, one in Shanghai and one in Chongqing. The man in Shanghai said it was more or less a picture of his life as it stood. For the man in Chongqing the same photo stood for the life he wanted: an apartment high up, a car of his own.

The two-and-a-half-year project is now in its final stage. The means of transport and the urban scenery that stand for mobility keep changing; bridges, elevated roads and ever easier ways of getting around have all become physical symbols of modernisation. But people don't only pose beside big buildings, Xiao Mi says. Beyond this broad-brush, politicised way of thinking, a hunger to climb the social ladder runs alongside ordinary people's worry about what they cannot control, and that makes for a complicated, contradictory state of mind.

"It isn't only an upgrade of urban infrastructure. More than that, it lets everybody have a dream, a different dream," Xiao Mi says. Except that people also worry about where the dream ends.

Besides the picture archive and the sociological survey, the project also includes work with the contemporary artist Wang Gongxin, who will present an experimental video piece, to be shown at the French National Archives in Paris in 2018.

Sauvin is still hoping for more collaborations like these. The 850,000 old negatives are a huge database — though next to the digital world, not that huge — and only ideas can open it.

(Images / Shanghai Center of Photography)