Etienne Renzo has rediscovered lost and unpublished photographs he took in China nearly 50 years ago as a young, self-taught photographer.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 out 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 it had not yet opened its borders. People could only go there for professional reasons or out of sympathy.

At the time, Etienne Renzo met both of these conditions. As a young photographer and correspondent for the new "Libération" newspaper in Marseille, set up 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 anaesthesia.

Etienne Renzo recently found almost two hundred photographs of this trip that had never been printed or shown. He has made an initial selection, saying: "It was a time of closed borders, with the Maoist regime imposing very strict controls on entrants, and particular surveillance of unauthorised photographs... Of course, I visited many hospitals there, and given the opportunity, I was able to move around quite easily in the districts of the metropolises 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' flats. 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. They depict an in-between moment when the global world, and China in particular, which is beginning to industrialise, have not yet fully turned towards the unbridled capitalism that is about to 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 beautiful and precious. They have a special charge and energy. They offer a counterpoint to the often dramatic realities of history and daily life, through the compassionate humanity of the way they look at people and their environment.

Photographs that heal, in a way. Like antidotes. Like acupuncture points that restore fluidity between cultures and timeframes that we still too often oppose or forget. Or forgotten. And which we will 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.