"This time is from 1985, when everyday Chinese accessed film photography, to 2006, when digital started taking over," he said. "It's really the birth of post-socialist China."The rapid spread of cheap automatics allowed ordinary people to capture the country's changing face.Zooming in on the Samsung Galaxy Camera. But while the collection spans hundreds of thousands of lives, the same themes appear again and again.
The portraits of women posing with their fridges emerged in the late 1980s, as people acquired more household goods. Later came shots with Ronald McDonald, as the Chinese discovered fast food. Photos of the Eiffel Tower followed as wealthier families began travelling abroad."In the western understanding of photography now we see a good picture as something that is shot discreetly, without the person being aware," said Sauvin.
But in these photographs "you have complicity between the photographer and the person being photographed. It's not a stolen photograph … It makes them very intriguing, very unpretentious. And they're just quite funny. All those are qualities pretty hard to find in photographs today."The artist was buying prints by contemporary Chinese photographers for the Archive of Modern Conflict in London when he decided he needed a change from the expense and ego of professional work and started seeking amateur images.
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