RECENTLY, Thomas Sauvin has been a bit obsessed by women with fridges. Over almost four years, the Beijing-based French artist has amassed more than 500,000 negatives from Chinese amateur photographers which had, until his intervention, been destined for destruction.

“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. 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.

When he came across an advert from a man seeking negatives, he assumed he had found a rival buyer. Instead, he discovered, Xiao Ma worked in the recycling trade and collected X-rays, negatives and CDs so he could drop them into a pool of acid and sell the resulting silver nitrate to chemists.

These days he sells Sauvin the negatives, by the kilo, but is “super not interested” in the artistic results.

Sauvin has selected pictures for an exhibition at the Format photo festival in Derby in March, but the collection has grown beyond him. Collaborators see the negatives in different ways, picking out other images and finding new uses for them, he said.

One, illustrator Ray Lei, created an animation from near-identical shots of different people. He wanted bulk and repetition, rather than distinctiveness.

“I’m creating a historical archive. The worst thing that could happen is for it to be digested by me and me alone,” said Sauvin.  — The Guardian, London