黎滩河畔 / The Dawn River
“What kind of life would I have lived if I had never left?”
This project began as a quiet return to my hometown, Lichuan, a small town in Jiangxi Province — one of the least gender-equal regions in China. I left for Shanghai when I was six, and ever since, my sense of identity has been split between two places that shape me in very different ways.
Through photographing women in Lichuan — from childhood to old age — I explore what it means to grow up there versus here. These images are not a documentation of rural life, but a reflection on possibility and loss: the versions of myself that could have existed, and the invisible structures that shape women’s lives in my home province.
Between these quiet observations, moments of tenderness often conceal deeper unease — a couple embracing by the river bridge, gestures that seem romantic yet echo the gentle persistence of patriarchy. What appears sweet or ordinary often carries the weight of social expectation.
For many Jiangxi women, leaving is an act of resistance — yet distance also creates guilt, tenderness, and longing. My work navigates this tension: between affection and critique, between memory and social reality, between the idealized “home” of my childhood and the place it has become.
In The Dawn River, photography becomes a way of reclaiming sight — to witness the ordinary lives of women, and to understand how both love and constraint quietly flow beneath the surface.
黎滩河畔 Mini Photobook Preview video | Duration: 02:53
My exploration of “hometown” began in middle school, when I wrote essays about snow and street food in Jiangxi. In high school, I filmed videos during Lunar New Year visits to my ancestral home, though I never finished editing them. Years later, I rediscovered a stack of color photographs my mother had taken there on film — images I now treasure. These personal memories, alongside inspirations like Raymond Depardon’s work on his own hometown, led me to begin photographing my hometown of Lichuan on black-and-white film. To me, childhood memories exist in black and white: fireflies my grandfather caught for me, the orange groves my grandmother took me to — all in faded tones of the past.
What She Saw ：
——Lichuan through my mother’s eyes
In college, I stumbled upon a set of old photographs my mother had taken in our hometown using a film camera. She handed them to me and said they were mine. At the time, I didn’t fully grasp their emotional weight. Now I just want to preserve them properly — and perhaps, one day, create an exhibition dedicated to her, myself, and the place we came from.
Much of the architecture, lifestyle, and even the scent of the air has changed. The river that once ran in front of our door, Dawn River, has shifted or vanished. But still, I recognize my hometown at a glance: it’s unmistakably Lichuan.
Years later, I learned what photography truly meant to her. "I loved it passionately, but had to give it up for survival," she once said. Those simple words – "for survival" – hold countless unspoken hardships.
Photographer： 篁竹街人～冯玲
