Photographer’s 60-Year Career Records Huge Changes

80-year-old Xu Yonghui has dedicated his 60-year career to photographing rural people and huge changes in rural areas in Zhejiang. Now a senior photo journalist with Zhejiang Daily, Xu has recorded, among other things, the life of Ye Gentu and his family over the past 60 years, which is an unprecedented documentation in the history of Chinese photograph journalism.

The first photograph was taken in the early spring of 1950s. On assignment in Jiaxing County in northern Zhejiang, Xu one day happened to see a boy and a girl singing a song loudly on a village grain ground, which served as a playground for the two kids. The photographer approached the children, who led the young photographer to their home. That day, Xu Yonghui took a photograph of the Ye family for the first time, thus starting the sixty-year photographic coverage of Ye Gentu and his family.

Xu Yonghui came back to the village in the autumn of 1954 in the hope of photographing Ye Gentu and his family again. Unexpectedly the family had moved away, seemingly leaving no trail at all. Ye searched and finally located the family again in September 1959 in Huangyan, a county in southern Zhejiang. It turned out that Ye had made some money thanks to the crop harvests in the four consecutive years following the founding of New China in 1949. With the small fortune, Ye moved the family back to Huangyan and joined his mother and settled down there. The family now had a private lot and raised some pigs. The poverty-stricken appearance that clung to the Ye family in the early spring of 1950 was gone. Xu took another picture of the family. He also wrote a short poem to go with the picture. The picture and the poem were published in Zhejiang Daily, under the title of “A decade of a family”. Xu Yonghui became a friend with the family. In 1962, Ye Gentu invited Xu to attend the wedding of his daughter Ye Guifeng. Xu had the photograph taken in 1959 enlarged and brought it to the family as a gift. The photograph became part of the dowry.

A modest and friendly man, Xu has kept friendship with the family over the past 50 years since 1959 and sent the family Spring Festival gifts every year. The third generation children of the family call him Grandpa Xu. The five-member family is now an extended family with four generations. Each of the children of Ye Gentu is a story worth telling. The stories of the family members, put together, constitute a complete picture reflecting a millennium’s worth of social change in rural Zhejiang over the past 60 years.

Ye Gentu and his family are not the only people Xu Yonghui has followed with his camera. The studio at photographers’ home has more than 100 photograph file boxes, each containing photographic records of some rural people in Zhejiang.

These photographs are not merely photographic records. They are history, through which we see what have really happened in rural Zhejiang over these years.

Li Zhaodi was a teacher engaged in a rural literacy program in Longquan County in southern Zhejiang. In the winter of 1957, Xu Yonghui traveled by bus for two days and walked a day and half in snow into mountains before he was able to photograph her teaching villagers to read in a dilapidated room without electricity, with her baby on her back. On another occasion, Xu Yonghui saw Hu Xiang, an eager village woman, learning from an old man how to plow on one of his beats in rural area.

An expert on rural issues comments that the extraordinariness of Xu Yonghui’s pictures is not that his pictures are about rural people, but that his pictures have names and stories and an unparalleled completeness, depicting the huge changes the same people have experienced.

That is exactly why Xu Yonghui himself has been noticed and respected by his peer journalists. At the invitation of CCTV, China’s largest television network, Xu Yonghui appeared on the eve of the 1994 Spring Festival at CCTV’s gala celebration, the biggest variety show on the earth in terms of audiences. At the show he showed four pictures of the Ye family taken during a span of 45 years and told the stories concerning how the family struggled from poverty to prosperity. In 2007, Xu Yonghui was invited back again to CCTV and told more stories about the life of the Ye family.