Yao Jianzhong, photographer at China Photo Studio, teaches customers to pose in September 2016. Zou Hong/China Daily
Times have changed
The days when order-keeping seemed to be a bigger issue than moneymaking were long gone for China Photo Studio in the 1990s. The arrival of studios from Taiwan changed the landscape of photography on the mainland by introducing concepts of drama and theatricality.
Demand for old photo studios dwindled to a thin stream. Going with the flow seemed to be the obvious option, and both China Photo Studio and Shanghai New People Photo obliged, with initial reluctance. Today, both have their own "shooting base" on the outskirts of the city, to cater to clients whose fantasies go far beyond the studio walls.
Yet on the other hand, there's always a yearning to reach back deep into the studios' archives, a yearning that found its urgency when a collective nostalgia started to take hold after 2000. Early clients who were now in their 60s and 70s wanted some form of visual connection with the past, while their offspring, after a perusal of the commercial studios, rediscovered the cool appeal of a vintage photo, a silent, unpretentious, yet deeply emotional frame that conceals as much as it reveals.
In retrospect, all these changes become trivial in comparison with the advent of digital cameras that were about to redefine photography. While Yao, who had learned about photography from his father after joining China Photo Studio in the 1980s, had to adapt to new equipment and learn how to use a computer, Gao, who used to work in the dark room, found his art rendered obsolete by new technology.
"Gone are the days when a picture is hand-colored and the first thing a trainee like me learns is to sharpen a pencil in a way that it won't be easily broken," said Gao, who as a child lived just around the corner from the studio on Wangfujing Boulevard, and whose mentor at the studio, Xu Songyan, is the only one among the 18 who came to Beijing in 1956 that is still alive today.
"Before the coming of China Photo Studio, the street probably had 10 or 20 small photo studios, most of them operated by husband-and-wife duos. They were either disbanded or incorporated into China Photo Studio, but that's another story," he said.
Every time a teenage Yao was in the studio, his father would ask him for a helping hand. "Most of the time, I prepared men's shirts for photo sessions, rubbing away the ruffles with my hand," he said. "They were not even shirts really - just the upper half of it that clients wore for a stellar picture."
And shirts are one of the things that Yao remembered most vividly about his father, who passed away in 1997 at the age of 73. "My father liked smoking as much as he liked watching people on the street thinking about how he would have photographed them. He was too preoccupied with his thoughts to notice the holes burned by cigarette ash on his shirts," he said.
According to his son, throughout his life, Yao Jingcai never really completely got accustomed to his adopted home. "The weather of Beijing was simply too dry for him, and he had always preferred his old diet," Yao said. "But he stayed in Beijing and in China Photo Studio long after retirement, while many of his old colleagues had returned to Shanghai."
"Where the capital hadn't proven attractive enough, the photo-taking did," he said.
