After spending time in Shanghai, french photographer Alain Delorme expresses what he saw culturally with his latest exhibition, Totems. His work is the result of two residencies in the city and underlines the photographer’s fascination for the pressures undergone by migrants. Piles of goods labeled “Made in China” are stacked up to create quite unusual sculptures, symbols of the Chinese ever increasing fetish for objects. By people, rickshaw or wagon each stack suggests a supernatural ability and slight obsession. The totems vertical nature echoes the incessant expansion of urbanity – constantly under construction. The photographer gives a new vision, full of humor and poetry of these porters, at the same time super heroes and ants with impressive loads. Far from the typical photos of China portraying crowds, he focuses on these workers’ individuality and uniqueness, in contrast with all of the indistinguishable and interchangeable objects. Beyond this supposedly smooth portrait of China we feel a “worrying strangeness.” “Far from a hymn to materialism, these images highlighting the overabundance of objects tend to become absurd and point to the complexity of a society reinventing itself.”
