He Wanted Images Taken Seriously, So This Photographer Started a Publishing Business Called Wuxiang | Great Little Studios

The spread of digital photography left Ni Liang feeling that "words are faint, images weightless." Printing photographs into books is how he fights back — and the "blue ocean" he is betting will turn into a business.

On January 12, 2019, a café in the Binhu district of Wuxi held a photobook exhibition. Nearly 100 works were on show, sent to Wuxi by photography enthusiasts around the country for the "2018 Wuxiang Zine Photobook Award." Ni Liang and the Wuxiang studio he runs organized the competition, and asked that entries be simply bound, saddle-stitched booklets anyone could make by hand — "zine photobooks (Photo-Zines)."

Making a zine is no great feat; some entries were nothing more than photos printed on ordinary paper and slipped into an envelope. When he called for submissions, Ni Liang set no limits on subject matter or number of photos, and said the binding could be "saddle-stitched, sewn, or not bound at all." He thinks a low bar like this lets photography enthusiasts sort and edit their own work, giving personal expression an organized form instead of leaving it scattered across social media.

What he wants is for photographers to see how much it matters to examine, edit and publish their own work — which is what Ni Liang himself does. In 2015 he founded Wuxiang studio in his hometown, Wuxi. Besides making custom photobooks for photographers, the studio has put out several magazines of varied content. Zines are part of what they try: these thin, light books are simple in content and cheaply priced, so they sell faster than heavy photo albums, and faster than magazines, which hold little collector's value.

Sisi (《偲偲》), a zine Wuxiang published in early 2018, is one example. The book collects childhood photos of a Wuxi girl named Deng Sisi, taken by her father, Deng Jian, between 1985 and 1990. They were scanned from negatives, so although the parks and interiors in them carry a strong sense of period, the images themselves look freshly shot, rich in detail.

The zine measures 150 x 210 mm, about the size of a primary school textbook. The two characters of the title on the cover are set in the ornate STCaiyun typeface with a double underline, and a small red flower sits at the upper left of the title, echoing the flower in the little girl's hair in the cover photo — retro touches that turn the book into a plain, homespun collection of history. In January 2019, Popular Photography, the magazine of the China Photographers Association, invited Deng Jian and his daughter to record an oral history. Deng Jian told her: "Oh sweetheart, the colors that came off those negatives are exactly the same as thirty years ago. I really didn't expect that. And I never expected this many people would like them!"

This is not the only time the Wuxiang team has worked with old photographs; they clearly have an appetite for pictures that hold onto the small, ordinary details of how people lived in another era. In January 2019 they published Early Works, a collection by the photographer Han Lei, made up of photos he took between about 1987 and 1995 in his hometown of Kaifeng and on travels north and south. Han Lei is past fifty. After graduating in 1989 from the Central Academy of Arts and Design (now the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University), he exhibited in many parts of the world, and in 1997 he won the Mother Jones documentary photography award in the United States.

The photos in Early Works have no clear theme; they read more like a visual diary the photographer kept offhand in his twenties: a huge billboard going up on a Shenzhen street in 1994, a young woman in a checked shirtdress with a fashionable handbag; or Yan'an, Shaanxi in 1992, where signs for "art wedding photography" and small inns line the streets, factory chimneys pour out black smoke, and women in headscarves hurry past.

"In that era, I imagine Chinese photography was all about stressing the good parts of our lives, or the new parts. (The French artist) Thomas Sauvin, for instance, did a series where a family buys a refrigerator and every one of them poses with it," Wang Dingding, Wuxiang's photo editor, told QDaily. He thinks Han Lei's early photos are precious exactly because they are not that kind of "only stress the good" picture — "his scope is much bigger; what he pays attention to is people." Because Han Lei shot from personal experience, Wang Dingding says, the symbols of the era he observed and recorded come out more nuanced and complete.

Photos that "look casually snapped but carry sharp observation and a quiet control of the frame" are a type the Wuxiang team likes. But, as with Han Lei's work, before they are edited into a book such photos tend to be scattered, offhand, seemingly without system — "the artist may just be making the work, without even noticing the logic running through it." That leaves whoever edits the book far more room to sort and arrange. In Ni Liang's words, he wants readers turning page after page to feel the relationships between photos: their sequence, progression, rhythm and layering.

When Wang Dingding got hold of Han Lei's photos, he first picked out the similar ones and grouped them: shot in the same place, perhaps, or composed alike; or similar in subject — all children, say, or all scenes from village opera; or by a standard hard to quantify, like "the people in the photos share the same temperament, the same state."

Then he began to arrange them. In one section he might follow a natural narrative timeline, from children to old people. In other, more specific scenes he tried to feel what the photographer felt at the time: imagining how Han Lei first watched a village opera or a yangko dance, slowly entered the scene, and then took the pictures. "It really is hard to say clearly," Wang Dingding said, grinning a little bashfully. "It's not that I don't want to tell you — it's no secret. But it's true: one picture beats a thousand words."

Counting the early magazines and zines, Han Lei's Early Works is the eighteenth photobook Wuxiang has published, four years after the studio was founded in January 2015. Back then the old Wuxi Television site on Hubin Road had been turned into a startup park, and preferential policies kept the rent lower than at commercial parks in comparable spots. Ni Liang took a 50-square-meter room on the second floor for 2,000 yuan a month and spent two months and 60,000-70,000 yuan fitting it out to store books and work in.

Two years later he also rented a room downstairs of roughly the same size, but divided into three, to serve as an exhibition space, an art bookstore and a small museum area — though funding problems forced him to hand it over not long after it opened. Today, besides Ni Liang as principal, the Wuxiang team is two designers in Wuxi and photo editor Wang Dingding, who works remotely from Beijing.

When he founded Wuxiang, Ni Liang was still a photographer himself, though the identity did not last long; most of the time he stayed in the state of an "enthusiast." He began studying design at Jiangnan University in Wuxi in 2002 and stayed in the city after graduating — "costs are low here, it's easy to live comfortably." He worked as a network administrator at a travel agency and as a temp at a Wuxi archive, helping sort image materials. Those relatively unhurried jobs gave him time to keep up his identity as a "photography enthusiast," to keep shooting and reading. Wuxi had no real photographers' circle of its own, so apart from scattered books and the occasional photographer he could meet, almost everything he learned about photography then came from the internet — from Xitek, for instance, the photography forum that had been busy since the early 2000s.

Ni Liang thinks he benefited from the internet of that time, and next to today's version he plainly misses it. He put a desktop computer and broadband in his dorm room. "You have to understand, the internet was open back then; there was still plenty of information you could reach." More important, he gradually met like-minded people online, and often went to meet them in person — "that was the thing to do then." As he sees it, the technology was less advanced than it is now, but information being relatively single-channel and concentrated actually let you understand a person or a subject fully and well — "not like now, when people have too many ways to express themselves; one person might have five different kinds of social accounts, and on every account he's a different person."

But this scattered accumulation only widened his view; with no proper professional grounding in photography, his confusion kept growing. In the years after graduating he was often stuck in a state of "not being able to see why a photo is good." "Why are the photos everyone recognizes good? Aren't mine shot pretty well too? Why not me?" he said, opening one hand as he spoke.

In 2011 Ni Liang left Wuxi for the School of the International Center of Photography in New York, and spent a year on its "Photojournalism and Documentary" program. In his words, that year made him a man who had eaten a great many delicacies but could not digest them or put on weight right away: in class and in the archive he was guaranteed to look at and analyze large numbers of pictures every day; the museums and galleries were so numerous that he saw the masters' shows with his own eyes. Most important, he saw how a photographer moves through the common cycle of "create, publish, exhibit, get collected" to earn a return and then create again. Within that cycle, publishing books on paper and holding public exhibitions are the steps that widen a photographer's influence.

From then through the years after he came home, Ni Liang kept trying to become a photographer. In New York he photographed people on the street and gathered the work into a book when he graduated. He had wanted that form since university — Zhou Mi, a photographer based in the United States, had given a talk at Jiangnan University, and Ni Liang saw his pictures of street performers in New York, and the details of his conversations with them. Back in Wuxi after his studies, he tried photographing his hometown's scenery, producing a series called "Memories of the Lake."

Along the way, Ni Liang's thinking changed. For one thing, he found that the path he had watched photographers take in the United States was not mature in China, which turned becoming a successful photographer into "ten thousand people crossing one log bridge" — "in the short term all you may get is a few likes on social media." For another, Yan You in Ningbo had already founded Jiazazhi to make custom books for photographers. "Photographers all over China were waiting for Yan You to publish their books, so I thought, why not turn a one-lane road into two," Ni Liang said. Trained in design and having handled photo editing in New York, he thought he could try to open up this "blue ocean" of "giving photographers in China more possibilities."

Yan You had built his career in Beijing before going back to Ningbo; Ni Liang chose to start in his hometown instead. The reason was simple — Wuxi is close to Shanghai and cheap to live in. "If I'd gone to Beijing or Shanghai then, I'd have had to find another job to keep myself alive, run myself ragged and get nothing done." That meant putting up with "no circle around me" and with Wuxi's small market, and going on relying mainly on the internet to find photographers and sell books.

The first attempts went smoothly enough. Ni Liang met Wang Dingding, a fellow enthusiast, in a QQ group. Wang had been working at a tire design factory in Beijing for nearly ten years and had "long been itching to quit"; in the end the two became partners. Weibo, and Renren before it, introduced him to other photographers, among them Ning Kai from Zhengzhou, Henan.

In 2012 Ning Kai was shortlisted for Xitek's Rising Star in Photography award, and Ni Liang met him for the first time and became his friend. Later he watched Ning Kai meet and come to know his partner, the Dutch photographer Sabrina Scarpa, and even interpreted for the two at their first meeting. Ning Kai and Sabrina became a creative duo; to break down the boundaries their different cultural backgrounds set, they traveled and photographed the natural scenery along the way, exploring "the land between us." Starting with a trip in 2015, they shot a great many photos of bright color and layered light. In 2018, Ni Liang proposed sorting the pictures into a photobook, The Land Between Us.

Ning Kai also introduced Ni Liang to the well-known Japanese photographer Koji Onaka, which led to a collaboration Ni Liang is proud of. Over four years, setting aside the thin, cheap zines, Wuxiang's best-selling photobook has been Slow Boat, Koji Onaka's fifth solo book, published at the end of 2017: 800 copies printed, and more than a year later just over 100 left. This was the book's third edition, and Wuxiang's job was to reproduce it; the first two, published in Japan in 2003 and in Germany in 2008, had sold out.

The photographer, born in the 1960s, has published more than twenty photobooks, known for a plain, unhurried style. His work is collected and exhibited in many places, which has made him well known, and that is a big reason the book sold. In April 2018 some of its photos were shown at the Wuxiang space, which drew more attention to both the photographer and the book.

But this is not how Wuxiang's books usually sell, and four years on the difficulties have grown plain. From the sales of the 18 books it has published, Ni Liang reckons that a book's price runs to roughly three times its printing cost, and that sometimes part of a print run goes to the photographer as royalties. All told, costs come back in about two to three years — and even reaching that point takes constant promotion and public education to build up consumers and audience. To cover rent, staff salaries and other costs now, Ni Liang also freelances in design and curating and helps photographers sell work. He is just about holding on, and carries some debt.

Limited reach is one bottleneck in his business. The Wuxiang exhibition space he rented on the ground floor of the park stopped operating in 2018; it looked like a good place to spread the word, but Wuxi has no concentrated audience, and cheap rent is useless without income to subsidize it. The internet that once served him so well has also begun to disappoint him. "It feels like we're back where we were 20 years ago — the internet has started to split apart, and everyone has turned into an individual again." The cause, he thinks, is that information is now so dense that it wears people out instead, lowering both their trust in any one thing and the concentration of their attention. He took out his phone and pulled up a Weibo post where Wuxiang had been selling a book: 220,000 views. "But in fact we sold fewer than ten copies on Weibo," he said, narrowing his eyes. "How do you even define a conversion rate like that? The internet and the media may be doing less and less."

It brings to mind the name he gave the studio, "Wuxiang (Imageless)"; the slogan, "words are faint, images weightless"; and the logo, a box with a cross through it, the digital era's sign for "image failed to load." None of it sounds cheerful, perhaps because Ni Liang and his team know how far what they value sits from today's mainstream. When Wuxiang was founded he had already borrowed a line from Yan You of Jiazazhi: "Independent publishing is a journey in the negative direction."

So what is it they hold onto so stubbornly? Simply this: Ni Liang has watched digital photography spread until taking a picture, uploading it and browsing it on a web page all became easy. To him, that casualness makes it likelier that valuable images will be buried rather than taken seriously — which puts the respect and reward he believes good photographers deserve further out of reach still.

Wang Dingding agrees. He thinks that once a photo enters the sequence of printing, editing, binding into a book and then circulating further, every step tests its content and quality — "it isn't done any old way." What they are after — letting a photo carry information through the quality of the paper, the binding, the layout, even the smell of a book — sounds close to extravagant next to the nine-grid photo posts flying everywhere. Turning that into a business fundamentally requires more people to understand this kind of care, which the Wuxiang studio plainly cannot bring about on its own.

"I know what we do runs a bit against the times, like Don Quixote," Wang Dingding said, a thoughtful look on his face. He does see new things appearing: "Some Japanese and Western photographers are using what digital is good at, making things unlike anything before, quite lively and vivid... as if they weren't a continuation of history at all, as if they'd jumped out of nowhere." "To be honest, there are still a number of question marks in my head. I don't have the answers, and I don't know what form photography will take in the future." He looked a little lost, but his knowledge of and attachment to the printed page have already given him his own way of resisting "carelessness."

Ni Liang seems more certain. With the studio's two designers both about to leave Wuxi, he has decided to go to Shanghai and seek out institutional partners in person. "Since people online have no time or interest in understanding something, then to build that understanding you may need to go back to the offline era — carry the books and, in the traditional way, call on people and institutions one by one."

The banner image is a photo from Sisi, by Deng Jian. The cover image is the cover of Early Works. The long-format cover photo is by photographer Bai Linghai, from Treevia, published by Wuxiang studio. Unless otherwise noted, all images in the body of this article were provided by Wuxiang studio.