Family photograph

Traditional practices — like funerals, ancestor rituals and prescribed forms of mourning — continue to structure how loss is observed. But emotional expression is often more constrained, shaped by an ethic of restraint, of not burdening others with one's grief.

A few years earlier and hundreds of miles away, Wang Naigong had found herself drawn into a different, but no less intimate, encounter with death.

The photographer's project, Jiu'er, began not as an artistic statement, but as an extension of something familiar: the family photograph. She had been asked to take pictures of a young mother, Jiu'er, with her three children. The woman was seriously ill.

At first, Wang approached it tentatively, but then her work picked up pace.

Over the next several years, she returned again and again, following the woman's life as it crawled toward its ultimate end. The work expanded into a long-term project. Using large-format cameras, Wang staged and restaged scenes from daily life, focusing not on eldercare details, but on something harder to capture on camera — atmosphere, emotion and the shifting relationships within a family.

"I'm a third person, a witness," she said.

The images are black and white, deliberately stripped of color. Wang wants to avoid what she calls the "consumption" of illness — the way suffering, when rendered too literally, can become something to be looked at, even pitied.

"I didn't want people to see her as merely a patient. I wanted them to see her spirit," she said.

What she saw, over time, was not only decline, but a kind of transformation. Despite the pain — sometimes intense enough to leave her sweating — the woman rarely expressed her discomfort outwardly. She continued her daily routines and even comported herself with dignity and composure to the best of her physical ability.

"She became more peaceful," Wang said. "Even more beautiful."

Although Jiu'er passed away in 2022 at the age of 36, her presence lives on in family memories, which consist of more than 700 photos taken over three years.

The resulting series of photos, titled I Am Still With You, won the photographer the Long-Term Projects, Asia category, at the 67th World Press Photo Contest. Now, the photos are also being displayed during the exhibition in Beijing.

If Zhou's work grew more popular due to active participation in eldercare, Wang's emerged from compassionate observation. But both circle around a similar phenomenon — the difficulty of speaking about death.

"In China, people still avoid it," Wang said.

In her experience, families often withhold information from the person who is ill, hoping to protect them. Conversations are delayed. Truths are softened. The result, she said, can leave behind a different kind of pain — one marked by things unsaid.

Last year, Wang's own father died. By then, her years working on the project Jiu'er had already begun to reshape how she approached loss. She stayed with him, accompanied him, and helped him do the things he wanted to do before his life's final chapter.

"I still cry," she said. "But I don't feel regret."