JiangJian

Jiang Jian (born 1953) is a Chinese documentary photographer whose sustained, decades-long projects have focused on the province of Henan, where he grew up. His photographic career began with a nostalgia for his own formative years spent on a farm during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when many officials, professionals and intellectuals — including Jiang’s family — were sent from cities to the countryside.

Inspired by August Sander’s systematic portraiture of German society, Jiang developed long-term social documentary projects that portray the lives of China’s rural lower classes, working in both black-and-white and color photography and telling each subject’s story with patient specificity rather than generalization.

His best-known body of work, Archives on Orphans (begun 2004), follows more than a thousand children in Henan who received support after a joint campaign by the Henan Charity General Federation and the Shaolin Temple. Jiang has revisited a core group of twelve of these children every five years since 2004, documenting how their lives unfold over a decade and more — a rare instance of a photographic project extending across an entire adolescence and into adulthood.

Jiang Jian lives and works in Beijing, and his work has been presented internationally, including at the Singapore International Photography Festival and in the Aperture-published essay 'Memory and History' by Vicki Goldberg.