An Ge, born Peng Zhengge in 1947 in Dalian, Liaoning, is one of the most representative documentary photographers of China’s reform and opening-up era. Known for his “tearful yet humorous” perspective, he captures social transformations through the lens of everyday people. With a diverse early career, An became a photojournalist at the Guangdong branch of China News Service in 1979, marking the beginning of his professional photography career. He later worked at media outlets such as China Tourism magazine in Hong Kong. Committed to the authenticity of documentary photography, he used his keen observational skills to document daily life in Guangdong during the early years of reform and opening-up. His archive of over 100,000 negatives serves as a valuable record of that transformative era. His seminal work, Living in the Deng Xiaoping Era, presents 800 images capturing the dramatic shifts in everyday life. Additionally, his curated exhibition, Humanism in China: A Contemporary Record of Photography, is widely regarded as a milestone in the history of Chinese documentary photography.

During China’s social transformation in the 1980s, An Ge captured a highly symbolic urban scene on Guangzhou’s Liuhua Road: a young couple flirting sweetly by the roadside. As a frontier city of China’s reform and opening-up, Guangzhou’s streets at the time were filled with fashionably dressed pedestrians, many wearing the trendy leather shoes, canvas sneakers, and sports shoes of the era. In the upper left corner of the photograph, cars and motorcycles reflect the improvement in people’s material living standards during this period. At the center of the image, the young woman’s radiant smile and the young man’s playful pose—cigarette between his lips—are frozen in time through An’s lens. Though a black-and-white photograph, it vividly conveys the vibrancy of colour and emotion.