Etienne Renzo has rediscovered lost and unpublished photographs he took in China nearly 50 years ago as a young photographer. They will be shown for the first time at the Galerie de l'Hôtel Atrium during the year-long Arles 2024 photography festival.

In 1975, China is living through its last Mao years and the end of the Cultural Revolution led by the "Gang of Four". The country's population was about to reach one billion, but its borders had not yet been opened. You can only go there for professional reasons or out of sympathy.

At the time, Etienne Renzo met both conditions. As a young photographer and correspondent for the new "Libération" newspaper in Marseille, created by the proletarian left and the Maoists, he was asked to accompany and document the trip to China by a group of doctors studying acupuncture anesthesia.

Recently, Etienne Renzo found nearly two hundred photographs of this trip that had never been printed or shown. He has made an initial selection, pointing out: "It was a time of closed borders, with the Maoist regime imposing very strict controls on entrants, and particular surveillance of unauthorized photographs... Of course, I visited many hospitals there, and given the opportunity, I was able to move around the metropolitan areas quite easily, and venture beyond the conventional itineraries, exploring deep rural areas and remote villages".

This series takes us back to real Chinese life. The China of bicycles and car-free streets. The China of workshops, factory fumes, schools and workers' apartments. It also shows temples and a Chinese wall still empty of tourists. And the traditional practices of acupuncture and Qi-gong, which are gradually returning to hospitals and parks after being hunted down.

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 vagaries of the history it has just lived through.

But these photographs are both historical and contemporary. For they depict an in-between moment when the global world, and China in particular, which is beginning to industrialize, has not yet fully turned into the unbridled capitalism that will tip the entire planet into a new era of no return.

For all that, Etienne Renzo doesn't press too hard where it hurts. That's why his images are so beautiful and precious. They have a special charge and energy. They offer a counterpoint to often dramatic historical and everyday realities, through the compassionate humanity of their view of people and their environment.

Photographs that heal, in a way. Like antidotes. Like acupuncture points that re-establish fluidity between cultures and temporalities that we still too often oppose or forget. Or forgotten. And which we'll have to come back to.

The first exhibition, "1975, Retours de Chine", 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.