He saved a million photographs from destruction. Inside, you will find a China that no longer exists

It is May 23, 1987. At a birthday party in Beijing, someone takes a picture of a young girl sitting on a red motorbike. Behind her stands a vending machine for Beibingyang Fruit, an orange soda. Nearly forty years later, that photograph reappears in an exhibition, and someone recognizes the girl: it is the birthday girl’s sister.

“It is one of the very few cases where, in a photo on display, someone discovers they are a ‘party involved’,” Thomas Sauvin, the French artist and collector behind the photographic project “Beijing Silvermine”, tells Domus.

Yet that photograph might never have reached us. The 35 mm negative from which it was printed was destined for destruction at a recycling plant on the outskirts of Beijing, along with thousands of others. Sauvin saved it. And he kept doing so for sixteen years.

Today, his archive holds more than a million photographs and stands as one of the largest collections of vernacular analogue photography in the world. A selection of 1,300 images is currently on show at Fotografiska Shanghai under the title “Beijing Silvermine. Archive Anthology”: a massive collective album spanning twenty years of Chinese daily life, from 1985 to 2005.

“It is not a timeframe I chose; it was this technology that experienced a period of flourishing that coincided precisely with the years of reform and opening-up led by Deng Xiaoping,” Sauvin explains. These were the years when Chinese life began to change, bringing fashion, entertainment, and the hope for a better future.

“There was a positive energy emanating both from the new photographic technology and from the new political direction. A temporal coincidence that serves as the essential ingredient behind these deeply moving and authentic images, which cannot be replicated. It is something unique and, I believe, what gives the archive its meaning.”

Sauvin’s relationship with photography and China began long before “Beijing Silvermine”. Born in Paris in 1983, his best friend since primary school was Théo Riboud, son of Magnum photographer Marc Riboud. “I came to know photography in the studio of my friend’s dad, which was plastered with photos. Marc always told us it was strictly forbidden to peel them off, but, of course, we stole them all the time.”

Sauvin studied Chinese from middle school onwards, made his first cultural exchange trip to Beijing at age 16, and returned to the capital at 21, where he ended up living for nearly fifteen years. He attended photo festivals and flea markets, worked for a collector, and began hunting for neglected and abandoned images.

The deeper he probed, the clearer a fundamental realization became: “The China seen in the most widely circulated photographs was a far cry from the China I experienced every day alongside local people.”

Then he stumbled upon a color photograph depicting a completely ordinary family scene, free of artistic intent or technical prowess. “Yet the energy it radiated was much closer to my actual experience of the country.”

According to Sauvin, very little trace of ordinary life and the soul of Chinese cities in the 1990s and 2000s exists in the imagery through which that era has been recorded. It was precisely that ordinary China—unaware that it was making history—that remained captured on the negatives he was looking for.

Sauvin found those negatives thanks to a man named Xiaoma, whom he tracked down through an online ad reading: “If you want to get rid of your negatives, contact me!”. Calling him up, Sauvin discovered he was no collector at all. He destroyed old negatives to recover the silver nitrate powder. Sauvin offered him a deal: instead of destroying them, he would buy them by the kilo.

“I picked up the first sack in May 2009, and the last one six months ago. I have been buying all his negatives for 16 years, and the collection now stands at just over a million photos.”

At first, Sauvin did not yet know what he was building. For the first three years, he kept collecting, developing, and looking through thousands of photographs. Only 1 or 2 percent seemed to hold anything of interest. Many were dull and repetitive; others damaged, dirty, or foul-smelling.

“Every time I bought a new sack, I asked myself: ‘What am I doing, and why?’”

Then the way he looked at them shifted. Sauvin realized it was not a matter of quality, but of quantity. The value did not necessarily lie in the individual photograph: it lay in the repetition. Before his eyes, a collective memory began to unfold, because those images all depicted the same place and the same historical moment.

Sauvin thus began looking at the archive with an anthropological eye, grouping images by recurring themes. One day he noticed a photograph with a Marilyn Monroe poster in the background. A few days later, he found another, and then another.

“Then you accumulate 15 or 20 similar ones, and you link them to Xiaoping’s opening-up, because 15 years earlier, a poster like that could have caused serious trouble for anyone keeping it at home.”

The same happened with dozens of other topoi: women posing in front of the home refrigerator, grandparents with twin grandchildren, domestic cats, photos taken at sunset or dawn, trips to the Pyramids in Egypt, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or Red Square in Moscow.

“They are little things that no artist or photojournalist shoots and no historian writes about, yet they are historically significant because they are close to everyday life, to the subtle changes that only vernacular photography can capture.”

It is precisely the accumulation that alters their meaning. The refrigerator someone decides to pose beside, the Western poster hung on a wall, a trip abroad: insignificant details in an individual family album that, observed thousands of times over, end up chronicling the desires, consumer habits, and social transformations of a nation.

“Only individual daily snapshots can capture these aspects without intending to. You move from intimate memory to collective memory. And the more you look, the more you spot series and themes, the more you realize that you are actually looking at the album of an entire city, if not an entire country.”

Sometimes that collective memory turns private again. As in the case of the girl on the motorbike, it happens that someone recognizes themselves or a relative in the displayed photographs. Sauvin then goes back to the negative—within an archive fully digitized after seven years of work—and returns the entire film strip to the owner.

“I find those stories very romantic, but that is not why the archive was created.”

Today, that million negatives has also taken on a significance Sauvin could not have foreseen when he began collecting them in 2009. In the age of AI-generated imagery, the physical tangible nature of film has also become proof.

Sauvin considers AI “a very interesting tool for finding material and assembling it,” but he remains very cautious regarding its use within the archive. “When I started, the premise was simple: to work strictly with images derived from 35 mm negatives found at a recycling plant in China.”

“The 35 mm negative you look at captures that exact moment, that light and shadow imprinted onto the film. It is authentic, real, unequivocal. Working with AI—whether to transform negatives or create new ones—worries me greatly because it would undermine the entire credibility of the archive.”

There is another constraint as well. Sauvin mentions having to self-censor during exhibitions in China to safeguard the project’s very existence. Outside the country, he notes, the selection will be different.

After Shanghai, “Beijing Silvermine. Archive Anthology” is scheduled to reach Shenzhen in April 2027, followed by Berlin, Stockholm, Tallinn, and Oslo. Meanwhile, Xiaoma keeps finding negatives, and Sauvin keeps buying them.

“I will keep doing it until he runs out, because an essential part of ‘Beijing Silvermine’s’ DNA—one I believe I will never stop working on—is witnessing the death of analogue photography in China.”

For Sauvin, it is a process bound to repeat itself: a technology that seems inseparable from our lives today will sooner or later become obsolete. And then we will begin to feel nostalgia for it.

“One day, perhaps, I will hand ‘Beijing Silvermine’ over to a public or private institution in China, and from that day forward, I hope it continues to live forever.”