What is folk photography and how to make valuable works?

Folk photography is simply photography with folk images as its theme. In layman's terms, it is to photograph people's own lives with cameras. In essence, folk photography captures the living conditions, lifestyles and interests of people of different nationalities and backgrounds with the eyes of photographers, thus forming colorful and varied folk images. Folk photography originated from the splendid culture of the Chinese nation for thousands of years, with a wide range of subjects and rich contents. Characteristics of Folk Photography Mr. Shen Che, the president of China Folk Photography Association, a folk photographer and theorist, once wrote: "Folk photography, in short, is photography with folk scenes as the theme, and in layman's terms, it is to shoot people's own lives with cameras." In essence, folk photography captures the living conditions, lifestyles and interests of people of different nationalities and backgrounds with the eyes of photographers, which constitutes a colorful and varied folk scene. Folk photography originated from the splendid culture of the Chinese nation for thousands of years, with a wide range of subjects and rich contents. Folk photography is a new category of photography that has just emerged. Its nature, mission, connotation, rules, techniques and requirements are different from other photography categories, such as news photography, landscape photography, people photography, advertising photography, architectural photography, still life photography and so on. However, it does not exclude a single folk picture for the purpose of artistic creation. Folk photography, with a strong interdisciplinary nature, directly or indirectly involves folklore, ethnology, anthropology, archaeology, history and many other disciplines, among which the knowledge is extremely profound. Folk photography, first of all, should show the characteristics of folk customs, in order to create a multi-faceted and multi-angle to screen and refine the special topics. Secondly, we should show the characteristics of folk photography. Folk photography is to advocate photographers to deeply explore and analyze a certain national theme. It is to let folk photographers go deep into life, dig deep into the material and reflect folk events in a complete series. Folk photography belongs to the category of documentary photography, which emphasizes the preparation, stage, climax and ending of any folk activity and the whole documentary process from beginning to end. Therefore, the photography form of folk photography should be a complete group photo of folk events. As the unique style and creative form of folk photography, thematic group photos and series group photos can not only provide detailed and complete picture basis for historical and folk research, but also unify the content, expression and creative style of folk photography. As Mr. Shen Che said in the article "Historical Mission of Folk Photography": "A series of thematic pictures can often break through the academic content and historical document value of the report. The performance of the series is varied, which can be a series of a nation or a series of a region; We can take the contents of different folk customs as a series, and we can also compare the contents of different folk customs as a series. The folk picture series is the most valuable and convincing. " Therefore, the complete theme photo and series photo forms are the perfect embodiment of folk photography style and skills, and are the unique characteristics of folk photography. As a young photography category, folk photography has many characteristics compared with other photography, that is, particularity. The particularity of folk photography determines that it has its own internal laws. If we master and adapt to these laws, we can gain sovereignty in the practice of folk photography, so that our own folk photography level can be continuously improved and innovated.