Alain Delorme offers a very singular vision of China in the days leading to the World Expo in his new Totems series. This work is the result of two residencies in Shanghai, supported by the Ailing Foundation. It shows the photographer's fascination for migrants’ pressures. Piles of products labeled “Made in China” are stacked up to produce quite unusual sculptures, symbols of the Chineses' a ever increasing fetish withobjects.
Raphaële Bertho, photographic historian, writes about Totems: “These workers carry throughout the city. These precarious columns made of cardboard, chairs, bottles or tires appear as the new totems of a society in complete transformation, both a factory for the world and a new El Dorado of the market economy.”
The totems vertical nature echoes the incessant expansion of the urbanity - constantly underconstruction. 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 Chinaportraying crowds, he focuses on these workers' individuality and uniqueness, as opposed to all of those indistinguishable and interchangeable objects.

Alain Delorme: Totems
Magda Danysz Gallery, Paris
from 4 to 25 September, 2010