Stainless Time

Stainless Time is a memoir with autobiographical coloring by the photographer Ren Shulin, following his Middle School Students of the 1980s; it was published by New Star Press in May 2018. Some 250,000 characters long, the book is accompanied by a great many photographs made public for the first time, looking back on the author's life from childhood to middle age and on his path in photography through text and image corroborating each other. The book begins with the author's childhood in Sanlihe, Beijing: his father was a soldier who entered the city in 1949, and his mother grew up in Beijing, the family carrying Manchu Plain Blue Banner ancestry. In those special years his father's camera fell early into his hands and became his "silent companion"; from the landscape imagery of Yuyuantan to campus life in his middle-school years, and on to the awakening and groping of his path into photography, the author unfolds personal memory and the atmosphere of the times layer by layer. The heart of the book is the story before and after the making of Middle School Students of the 1980s: how he climbed wild mountains, first photographed campuses, then the college entrance exams; how he "slipped into classrooms" to catch feet and backs and the expressions of summer and of senior-year students; how he recorded the daily lives of boys and girls in hushed schoolyards. The book also tells of youth by the Lugou Bridge, the Friday Salon and the April Photo Society, memories of the Stars Art Exhibition, his mentors and friends Di Yuancang and Chi Xiaoning, and later his departure from middle-school campuses, his deep dives into mining districts to photograph laborers, and the confusion and sudden insight after going into business. The book closes with "My Father and I," which portrays a bond both simple and complex. Courage, ambiguity, guilt, and revelation interweave between the lines, like the youth each of us has lived through. The book was selected for the Sina Good Books List for May 2018, with sincere recommendations from Bei Dao, Chen Danqing, Bao Kun, Hao Lei, Lao Lang, Zou Jingzhi, Shi Hang, and others.