Decades of change captured in images

Bao Yin uses black and white to highlight the cruelty of the desert. [Photo by Feng Yongbin/China Daily]

Bao Yin stares into his computer screen, carefully adjusting the colors of a photo.

"Many youngsters have absolutely no idea about what to shoot," he says. "You really need to know what it is that you want to capture; there needs to be a focus."

Bao, 59, knows a few things about that, having taken photos that capture the customs and practices of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region for more than 30 years.

Even if Bao talks approvingly of focus, there are few subjects that have not passed through his lens, whether it be the daily lives of herders, the work and antics of horses, the changes that have affected the region's environment or something else.

Something he has on the drawing board at the moment is a 100-meter-long scroll devoted to Mongolian wrestling, with various poses he captured on the grasslands, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the autonomous region in 2017.

"I've taken so many photos covering many aspects of the region, and want to create collections on themes such as camels and folk culture to promote our culture," he says.

Bao, a member of the Daur ethnic group, got into photography when he was about 25 in 1981, seven years before the dawn of commercial digital cameras. Just as he has watched the march of progress alter the face of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, he has stayed abreast of the revolution in photography, and uses software to turn his photos on computer into kinds of oil painting to make them more artistic.

His entry into photography was the result of his working in the Hohhot procuratorate, where he was in charge of taking pictures of crime scenes. He often read photography magazines and gradually became consumed by the subject, he says. From 1989 he studied photography for two years at college and started touring Inner Mongolia taking pictures.

Every year he was keen on taking two weeks off work to take photos, something his employer found impossible to accommodate, so in 1998, aged just 42, he applied for early retirement so he could concentrate on photography.