History is full of details, whose complexities are often beyond the imagination of any historian. With the invention of the camera, documentary photography has taken on an important role in preserving history and capturing time.
Wang Shilong, born in 1930 in Runan county, Henan province, was educated to the middle school level. Before 1950, he was a propagandist, an oil printer, and an army photographer, who took part in the Chengdu battle in Tibet. He became a reporter and photographer for local newspapers in 1955.
For more than thirty years, traveling through central China, Wang Shilong has documented the most important political and economic movements and events in rural China. For propaganda purposes or not, these photographs reveal to us the life of rural Chinese, as it coped with the mass movements, revolutions, and in particular, the social phenomenon and mood that were unique to China of that time.
Wang Shilong’s photos succeed in freezing the image of a particular era in Chinese contemporary history.
