Times gone in a snap

In the 1980s, in an era before machines were widely used, wheat harvesters were a common sight in northwestern China. Then, in the 1990s, migrant workers flocked to areas with concentrated populations, helping China build modern cities.

When the new millennium began, with China's accession to the WTO, a wave of desire to study abroad seemed to wash over the nation's students. In the 2010s, residential environments were increasingly improved and buying a property moved to the top of most people's bucket lists.

Nowadays, people live a good life, with few, if any, real shortages. Consumerism, as a result, has taken on a new urgency.

All these trends and phenomena can be seen in photos displayed at the Phoenix Center in Beijing. Since China's reform and opening-up in 1978, the great changes that have taken place are reflected in 40 Years of Chinese Photography. The exhibition presents more than 400 photos from about 40 photographers, demonstrating the profound changes China and its people have experienced in the last four decades.

"Photography has totally transformed people's relationship with the world," says Zhu Qingsheng, curator of the exhibition and also a history professor with Peking University. "It has two important functions. One is to document what happens and the other is to express emotions of the photographer."

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.

In 1998, Zhang moved to Shenzhen, a city that represents China's reform, and also a place where lots of migrant workers lived. He captured migrant workers lining up at the train stations to grab tickets to go home, and the "spider men" who helped clean high buildings and their scarred, gnarled hands, testament to their hard work and toil.

Zhang's works are regarded by critics as a comprehensive and fascinating portrait of migrant workers.

At the exhibition, there's a photo that has changed the destiny of many children who couldn't afford to go to school in the 1990s. It's Xie Hailong's photo of a girl with big eyes, writing in her notebook in a run-down classroom.

A newspaper photographer at the time, Xie went to a rural village in Anhui province. He walked into a primary school and happened to see a girl in shabby clothes studying hard in a classroom where the brick walls were full of holes.

After the photo was published, it evoked an incredible response and many people began donating money to support children like the girl in Xie's photo. From then on, Xie went to 128 poor villages in more than 20 provinces and took tens of thousands of photos to show children in need of help.

"There are photographers who often find stories behind the surface. Their works reflect another side of the world. But sometimes, they just photograph the people and things they are familiar with. It's a shared memory," says the curator.

For instance, under portrait photographer Xiao Quan's lens, many well-known celebrities were captured like an everyday acquaintance of the viewer. Xiao's photos show that writers, singers, film directors and other stars were ordinary people with their own troubles.

The photos on display are a series of portraits of Chen Mao-ping, whose English name is Echo, a popular writer from Taiwan who wrote about her life with her lover under the pen name Sanmao. Her books were loved by young people and many longed for the romantic life she depicted.

The photos recorded her life in Chengdu, Sichuan province, around the early 1990s. In them, she plays with children, chats with rickshaw drivers and enjoys the easy atmosphere of teahouses.

"Photographers like Xiao can easily capture people's life without them noticing," says Zhu.

Hong Hao scans thousands of things he uses in daily life, such as maps, ID cards, books, clothes, tickets and even food. For 12 years, he has kept putting all these things into photos to record his daily life, reflecting how consumerism affects our lives.

Ma Liang spent 10 years taking photos for people hoping to realize their dreams through images. He transformed his car into a moving photo studio and traveled to 35 cities, taking the pictures of 1,600 people.

With the development of technology, what is the meaning of photography? What can it bring to us when artificial intelligence seems as if it can do anything? That's also the exhibition's aim, says the curator — to demonstrate the great changes of society.