Thomas Sauvin’s Beijing Silvermine – The New Yorker

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