An Ge was among the first generation of young adults to mature after the founding of New China. During the Cultural Revolution, he and his camera participated in the “Great Liaison” campaign. For seven years he lived and worked in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province, an experience from which he derived cherished and lifelong memories. After China implemented the policy known as Reform and Opening-up, he became a photojournalist, witnessing and recording the surging tide of change in the southern provinces and regions.

An’s images are powerful in form; true-to-life, while also conveying his personal perception and emotional perspective. During the course of reform and opening-up, his lens was turned to recording the lives of ordinary people and their wide-ranging walks of life. In 2001, two of his personal collections were published, Living in the Deng Xiaoping Era — Vision 80’s, and Living in the Deng Xiaoping Era — Vision 90’s.

An Ge.

1986: A new home brings this Guangdong farming family happiness.

1985: Contestants at the “Youth Beauty Contest,” Guangzhou.

The earliest form of China’s fashion shows.

A child plays aside his mother, on duty at a workshop.

In August 1966, as the Cultural Revolution gathered momentum, I joined my schoolmates in the campaign of “Great Liaison.” I traveled to more than 10 provinces and autonomous regions across the country, including Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Xinjiang, and Sichuan. Besides a bamboo piccolo, I took along a Japanese-made Petri 2.8, and it was this simple camera that determined the course of my life.

In February 1968, at the age of 21, as one of the many urban “intellectual youth” dispatched to the countryside, I relocated from Beijing to the East Wind Farm in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province. There I worked and lived for seven years.

In 1975, I went to Guangzhou. In 1979, after four years as a factory worker, at the age of 32, I joined the Guangdong Branch of the China News Service, and my dream of becoming a professional photojournalist was made real.

Thirty years have passed, and it would here be difficult to put into words how gratified I am. I am so fortunate to have been able to witness and record with my camera the remarkable changes which have occurred in China in the past three decades.

Guangdong Province, China’s southern gate, led the way for modern China’s opening to the outside world, and it became known as the “window” to China’s reform and opening-up.

In 1981 I was dispatched to the city of Foshan to report on a meeting concerning the work of remittance by Cantonese residing abroad. To encourage overseas remittance, local governments formulated various preferential policies, including one that allowed local families to buy equipment with overseas remittances and operate private workshops, so as to support the employment of relatives of the overseas Chinese. In the beginning, it was stipulated that any private workshop could hire, at most, five workers; otherwise the proprietor would be defined as an “exploiter.” Later, the maximum limit rose to 10, then 20, then more. Finally, foreign-funded factories sprang up in the Pearl River Delta area, and many of the local farmers left the fields and entered the production plants. Captured by my lens was the human element of that wave of reform and opening-up, and benefiting from the preferential remittance policies, the southern Chinese earned their first pot of gold.

Behind my home is Gaodi Street, an age-old lane in the city proper of Guangzhou. In the early years, it was the first in the city to accommodate individual fashion merchants. In the 1990s, enjoying nationwide fame, this street was a must-see place for visitors to Guangzhou, as popular as the then Beijing’s Xiushui Street and the Temple Street and Ladies Market in Hong Kong.

I took many photographs of Gaodi.

In December 1998, in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the Guangzhou-based Yangcheng Evening News published a full page devoted to the images I captured in the 1980s. The feature was collectively entitled “Eyes Expression.”

Indeed, the expression in the eyes of my subjects was a symbol of the time. The nation opened and a fresh breeze of commerce blew in through China’s southern window. The subjects I photographed – those people, those surroundings, those objects … they were symbols of the new era. In my frame, they silently narrate an important tale of change.