Times gone in a snap

The curator adds that these photographers have vividly recorded people living around them, as well as the environment they lived in. All of them have taken photos for decades in their own unique ways. Many of the works on display focus on ordinary people or groups of people as seen during special periods in history.

Since 1982, photographer Hou Dengke started to take photos of wheat harvesters who moved from one field to another on foot or by train. This was a group of workers who earned their living by helping farmers to cut wheat between June and August in northwestern China.

When machines started being widely used in the 1990s, the job of wheat harvesters disappeared. Hou says that if he didn't record this group of people, others would never get the chance to know of their existence.

Li Xiaobin's lens focused on the popularity of dancing among young people in the 1980s. That decade saw many young people consider themselves trendsetters, wearing fashionable clothes and gathering at parks in cities across the country to drink beer and dance to disco music after such phenomena made their way to China from the West.

Li took more than 300,000 photos to record China's changes since the 1980s. He was regarded as one of the founders of documentary photography in the country.

Like Li, Zhang Xinmin also used his lens to document ordinary people. His subjects were the migrant workers who flocked into cities in the 1990s, an important group that, over the following two decades, helped supercharge the economy.