Etienne Renzo has rediscovered lost and unpublished photographs that he took in China nearly 50 years ago as a young photographer. They are being shown for the first time at the Arles Photography Festival 2024 for one year at the Galerie de l'Hôtel Atrium.

In 1975, China was experiencing its final years under Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution led by the "Gang of Four". The country was about to reach a population of one billion but had not yet opened its borders. People could only travel there for professional reasons or out of sympathy.

At that time, Etienne Renzo met both conditions. A young photographer working for the new newspaper Libération in Marseille, created by the proletarian left and the Maoists, he was asked to accompany and document the trip to the People's Republic of China by a group of doctors studying anaesthesia through acupuncture.

Etienne Renzo recently rediscovered nearly two hundred photographs from this trip that had never been printed or shown. He made an initial selection, noting: "It was a time of closed borders, with the Maoist regime imposing very strict controls on entrants and particular surveillance of unauthorised photographs... I visited many hospitals, of course, and as the opportunity arose, I was able to move around the city districts quite easily and venture beyond the conventional itineraries, exploring the deep countryside and its remote villages."

This series takes us back to real Chinese life. The China of bicycles and car-free streets. The China of workshops, factory smoke, schools and workers' flats. It also shows temples and the Great Wall of China, still empty of tourists. As well as the traditional practices of acupuncture and Qi-gong, which are gradually returning to hospitals and parks after having been banned.

For Etienne Renzo, showing these images today is like opening a time capsule to reconnect with a vanished world. He invites us on a transhistorical journey through the time of an eternal and paradoxical China shaken by the vicissitudes of the history it has just gone through.

But these photographs are both historical and contemporary. For they describe an intermediate moment when the global world, and China in particular, which was beginning to industrialise, had not yet completely shifted to unbridled capitalism, which would tip the entire planet into a new era of no return.

However, Etienne Renzo does not press too hard where it hurts. This is why his images are beautiful and precious. They have a particular charge and energy. They offer a counterpoint to often dramatic historical and everyday realities, through the compassionate humanity of the gaze they cast on people and their environment.

Photographs that are healing in a way. Like antidotes. Like acupuncture points that restore fluidity between cultures and temporalities that are still too often opposed today. Or that we forget. And to which we will have to return.

The first exhibition, "1975, Retours de Chine" (1975, Return from China), was made possible thanks to an invitation from Optim'art and Thierry Maindrault, who is curating it at the Hôtel Atrium gallery in Arles from April 2024 to April 2025.