Since 2009, the French collector and artist Thomas Sauvin has salvaged discarded negatives from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing, negatives that were destined to be destroyed. His Beijing Silvermine archive, one of the largest archival projects in China, now encompasses over 85,0000 anonymous photographs spanning the period from 1985 to 2005, thus allowing the reconstruction of a large part of the history of popular analogue photography in the country.

Thomas won the prize for the Exhibition of the year at Lianzhou Photo Festival in 2013. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography of Chicago, the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Art, and the Guangdong Museum of Art.