Beijing Silvermine began at a recycling plant outside Beijing. Old 35mm negatives arrived by the sackful to be dissolved for the tiny amount of silver they contained. French collector Thomas Sauvin started buying them before they reached the acid bath.
Over the next 15 years, he rescued more than a million anonymous photographs: weddings, holidays, birthdays, babies, awkward studio portraits, new apartments, and everyday moments from China between the 1980s and early 2000s.
Now the largest presentation of the project to date is at Fotografiska Shanghai, with more than 1,500 photographs, negatives, books and installations.
You don't need to care about photography to appreciate it. These aren't famous images or forgotten masterpieces—they're family snapshots. People posing on holiday, showing off a new TV, celebrating a wedding, gathering around the dinner table. The kind of pictures almost everyone has somewhere at home.
That's what makes the exhibition so affecting. These photos were never meant for galleries. They were meant to stay in family albums, but ended up in a recycling plant instead.
Beijing Silvermine: Archive Anthology runs at Fotografiska Shanghai from June 19 to October 18, 2026.
