China’s famous train photographer Wang Fuchun, whose work attracted international acclaim, has died in Beijing aged 79
- Wang’s work won awards all over the world after he started taking pictures in the late 1970s and documented a time of major transformation
- His photos have been exhibited all over the world, with his most famous work being Chinese on the Train, a photography book published in 2001
Starting his career as a railway worker in the 1970s, Wang, who won both domestic and international awards in photography, had spent over 40 years taking pictures of people from different walks of life on trains, providing a portrait of Chinese society during a time of radical transformation.
A winner of the Golden Statue Award for China Photography, the top award for individual photographers in China, Wang travelled all across the country and documented glimpses of everyday life on the country’s railway carriages.
His best-known collection, Chinese on the Train, a photography book published in 2001, won him the Special Contribution Award of the International Photographers Association of Los Angeles.
With works exhibited in Europe and the US, he was also listed as one of the 30 most influential Asian photographers by Asia’s leading photography platform, Invisible Photographer Asia.
From steam locomotives to bullet trains, images taken by Wang showcased the cultural, economic, and social changes that took place in a period when China rose rapidly as an economic power.
“In the late 1970s and early 1980s, what I photographed was all Jiefang suit and Jiefang cap (green attire worn by the People’s Liberation Army), or Zhongshan suit (advocated by Dr Sun Yat-sen). Everyone wore the same thing and looked the same,” he told Photo World, a monthly photography magazine under Xinhua news agency in 2014.
“Then by the end of the 1980s, people started keeping long hair and wearing boot cut pants. And when the 1990s came, the clothes people wore became more diversified and fashionable. It was a time when people started looking different from each other.
“This is what we call great social changes,” he said.
Born in China’s northeast in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, Wang graduated from a vocational railway college in 1970 and worked as a carriage inspector.
His artistic talent soon saw him working as a graphic designer for the railway bureau in Sankeshu, a town in Heilongjiang. However, his career as a documentary photographer began in 1977, when he was tasked with photographing trains as part of his job.
Since then he and his camera have travelled more than 100,000 kilometers on 1,000 trains, according to an article he wrote for leading Chinese photo agency China Image Center in 2017.
“I have special feelings for the railway,” he said.
“My lens has always focused on the dashing trains and the people inside since I started as a photographer in 1977,” he said.
“I’m grateful I caught the speeding train of the times as soon as I started as a photographer, that I managed to document all kinds of Chinese people on the trains and witnessed the great changes of railway amid China’s reform and opening-up,” he wrote.
Other collections of his work, including The People of Northeast China and Black Earth, have also won him praise at photography festivals in China.
In the new millennium he started documenting people on subways, featuring the fast-paced life in major mainland cities as well as Hong Kong.
