



1 / 16 Chevron Chevron Untitled, from the Beasts series

Last week, we handed over The New Yorker photo department’s Instagram feed to the French photographer Thomas Sauvin and his archival series Beijing Silvermine. The project began, in 2009, when Sauvin, who has lived in China for more than a decade, discovered an accumulation of 35-mm. negatives in a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing. Buying the negatives in bulk by the kilogram, he has become a curator of what he calls vernacular Chinese photography. He estimates that he has sifted through more than half a million images, taken by ordinary citizens, between 1985 and the early aughts, that depict everyday life, leisure, and travel, both in China and abroad.

Sauvin created an Instagram account for his project just six weeks ago. “I find it quite interesting to post solely analog photos from the last century onto a platform that is so much about the present and the digital,” he told me in an e-mail. To select photographs to feature on @newyorkerphoto, he reviewed about two hundred thousand images, grouping them in series with themes like Man and Nature, Afternoon Around the World, and Suns and Moons.

Surprisingly, no one has yet contacted Sauvin claiming to be the photographer or the subject of a Beijing Silvermine image. “I suppose this will happen sooner or later,” he said. But by working with discarded negatives—rather than albums or curated collections—he has created a trove of “accidental photos” whose owners likely never printed them in the first place. “The quantity of images involved allowed me to tell not individual stories but something more universal,” he said. “I often hear people saying that these images show a face of China they haven’t seen before.”

All photographs by Thomas Sauvin.