The new Totems -series by Alain Delorme plunges us into the core of contemporary China and its complexity. Under the blue sky of a highly colored Shanghai, men carry unbelievably precarious columns made of cardboard or chairs. These high-rising “columns” appear as new totems of a society in complete transformation: both a factory for the world and a new “El Dorado” of the market economy.

With a look of humor and poetry, Alain Delorme settles us in the heart of the “Chinese Dream”. Far from a hymn to materialism, these images let the viewer catch a glimpse of the complexity of a country reinventing itself.

(Read a two-page description of the project, written by photography historian Raphaele Bertho, here.)