In love with the camera

Wang says she does not care for Arbus' images at all. However, she says, "I really admire her attitude. She explored the character of those in the social margins: the poor, the vagrants and homosexuals. I could never ever understand this without reading books about her."

To Wang, spending money on books is like lavishing it on jewelry.

"When I find a set of good books, I am overjoyed. If I fail to get the books I want, it will be on my mind until I get them."

Over the past three years, Wang has spent about 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) purchasing some 6,000 books. Among them are 5,000 original editions, mostly in English.

The rarest and most expensive one is China and Its People, by British photographer John Thomson, who is regarded as the first foreign photographer to document China.

Wang spent 400,000 yuan to obtain this set of four volumes published in 1873, which includes over 200 images Thomson shot in places like Hong Kong, Fuzhou, Shanghai and Beijing around 1870.

In April 2015, Wang's three-story library, Yingshan Shufang, was completed at a cost 30 million yuan.

Commenting on the project, Jin says: "Wang has a generous heart. Collecting books and building her private library is actually building infrastructure for China's photography culture. It will fill the gaps that we have."

Jin adds that China's photography culture has long been controlled by ideology and commercialism.

"The former greatly affected photography in a negative way, while the latter affects the rational discussion about the photographic text and exaggerates the value of images. These two forces have created a group of photography experts who have hindered the development of a culture of photographic art."

Now, Wang says: "My ultimate intention is to let Yingshang Shufang develop into a organ that has academic value, let it to become a rich database for scholars in the future to study China's photography culture. If, in the future, when speaking of Jiaxing city, people could say, 'There is a library called Yingshang Shufang in the city,' I would feel greatly honored, and very happy."