Published : 20/11/2022
The longing to return home on the Spring Festival's travel rush, the anticipation of leaving home for the first time to study in faraway places...
Over the decades, trains have been not only an essential mode of transport for the Chinese people but have also witnessed the various human conditions in the world.
Photographer Wang Fuchun quietly documents all these with his lens. These pictures not only validate the evolution of China's railway development but also preserve the individual stories from different eras of passengers.
From painting to photography
Wang Fuchun, born in the '40s, formed a bond with trains from an early age. His house was near the railway, and he grew up to the sounds of trains.
He later attended a school for train drivers, but he did not eventually become a driver. Instead, he joined the railway department, where he was responsible for painting.
Trains were something Wang Fuchun liked from his childhood, but photography wasn't. He often came into contact with photography in his promotional activities but wasn't interested, he believed that "painting is art, photography is technology."
Until once, Wang Fuchun picked up a seagull-brand camera for the first time and realized: painting was too slow - he could only make a few paintings in a year but capturing them through a lens was quicker! Since then, he began to study photography.
He put aside his painting brush, picked up the camera and never put it down again.
Wang Fuchun underlines that he merges elements of fine art from his painting experiences into photography, allowing his photographic works to chronicle history without losing their aesthetic appeal.
In the 80s, Wang Fuchun even attended university to polish his photography skills and took the opportunity to travel throughout the national railways for his work.
"Trains" and "photography" became the main themes of Wang Fuchun's life.
Read more: Three generations of train drivers witness China's development
Wang Fuchun captures the "moving small society"
In the 80s and 90s, the green-skinned trains were slow and had few trips. As each door opened, passengers flooded into the carriage, sometimes it was pure chaos.
How did Wang Fuchun select and photograph his subjects?
"Anything with a story, plot, fun, I shoot." For Wang Fuchun, whatever exists in society exists on the train. The train is a constantly moving small society.
You can see the trendiest outfits of the time on the train, spot common people killing time with games, anything new that appears on the train becomes Wang Fuchun's subject.
Even if what is captured are ordinary scenes within the carriage, they offer a true glimpse into the lives of Chinese people during their journeys. These snapshots together form a precious history of China in the 80s and 90s.
Read more: Post-90s freely photographing rural elderly to capture their pure smiles
Are there no more stories to shoot on trains?
Over the past 40 years, he has recorded the evolution from green-skinned trains to white-skinned trains. He has captured the changes in railways and people alike.
"There were many stories to tell when photographing green-skinned trains in the 80s and 90s.
Six strangers sitting together, one is from Harbin, another from Shanghai, another from Lanzhou, and within a few minutes they have become friends, sharing cigarettes and drinking together."
Wang Fuchun describes them as "parting ways once they get off the train, but on the train, we're like a family."
In the 80s and 90s, a train journey could take from a day up to several days. To pass the time, passengers had to find things to do.
They would strike up conversations with fellow passengers, sometimes even inviting strangers to join them in games of poker, chess, or mahjong, thereby bringing them closer to one another.
Today's high-speed trains have higher frequency, faster speed, and better environment. People find traveling by these high-speed trains fast and comfortable, it's happiness and enjoyment.
However, from Wang Fuchun's photography perspective, he believes that interactions between strangers have decreased, and it's not easy to find stories within the train anymore.
Moreover, passengers are more focused on their own privacy now, which has increased the difficulty for Wang Fuchun to photograph.
In 2015, Wang Fuchun was assaulted by a child's father who mistakenly considered him as a villain when he photographed a young mother and her child playing with a mobile phone on a high-speed train.
Wang Fuchun lamented that while the times have advanced and he has grown old, but he emphasizes: "Stories on the train have diminished, but they've never disappeared."
M+ in Hong Kong collects two of Wang's works
Looking back over the decades, Wang Fuchun has accumulated over 10,000 negatives. In 2001, he sold three of his cameras and chose more than 100 photos from over 100,000 works to include in his photography collection, thereby publishing "Chinese on the Train."
He said: "This is my representative work, documenting the unforgettable memories of Chinese people traveling by train in the last century."
The next year, Wang Fuchun won the "Chinese Photographer of the Year" award, and in 2014 he was named one of the 30 most influential photographers in Asia by the "IPA International Photography Awards," often known as the Oscars of the photography world.
Wang Fuchun passed away in 2021, but his work is acknowledged as "unavoidable in the history of photography".
If you want to view Wang Fuchun's works, you might consider visiting M+ Museum in Hong Kong, which houses two of his works: "Wuhan on Train" and "Heilongjiang after New Year's Winter Swimming", to experience the Chinese narratives through his lens.