Cultural Revelation: In China, a Picture of Its People Takes Shape One Snapshot at a Time By Peter S. Goodman tells of pictures poor villagers take:

The photos are an outgrowth of a project being conducted here by the Nature Conservancy that has placed cameras in the hands of villagers to capture glimpses of their lives as they see them. The project is part of a larger undertaking -- the fashioning of a patch of land roughly the size of West Virginia into a collection of nature reserves. The photographs amount to data being collected as the environmental group works with provincial and national authorities to design the protected area. They are visual aids guiding efforts to accommodate the needs of local people by illustrating how they farm, build their homes and generally go about their lives in one of the more remote regions of China....

The images and the connected narratives have become a visual database drawn on by social and environmental scientists as they try to balance the everyday needs of local people with their mandate to preserve the surroundings. As they have studied pictures of people collecting wood for their cooking fires, they have responded by handing out low-tech but efficient stoves that need less timber. They have used photos of people trudging long distances to collect buckets of water as a way of pressing local and provincial governments to install much-desired tap systems....

But if the project began as a creative way to acquire basic information, it soon evolved into something larger, delivering a wholly unexpected outcome: Many of the images are stunning in their composition. Many are intensely personal, accessible and open in a way that has drawn an emotional response -- from the local people who saw them first, to the audience in Shanghai that saw them last month as part of an international art show....

The photos and stories evince a pride in workmanship in the daily tasks of producing food and the travails of not always succeeding. Two dugout canoes float empty against a riverbank. "Life is hard for the fishermen," reads the story. "They have to sleep in the cabin on the boat whenever they guard their fishing nets." A man cloaked in a brown felt poncho lies on a moss-covered boulder, his dog at his side. "They went hunting one day and came back empty-handed."

The images illustrate a tendency toward collectivism that predates the advent of communism in China and still endures. "After wheat is harvested, the land needs to be trimmed before rice is planted," reads the story attached to a panoramic view of golden stalks, mist-covered mountains looming in the background. "Villagers help each other in the work." Older men in blue cotton robes encircle a table, playing cards. A family kneels in a half-cut wheat field, over a pot of rice they eat together....

Perhaps the most striking thing about the collection is how these images challenge the notion -- common in the West -- that upland villagers in remote places are not built to handle change and abhor it as an assault on their pure way of life.

The glimpses of life in these photos reveal how even this corner of the world -- seemingly as far from the capital markets and advertising dens as one can get -- is nonetheless imbued with a palpable sense of upward mobility. Modernity is not the enemy so often portrayed by those intent on preserving village life and villagers themselves as if they were breathing display pieces. While the photographs revel in scenic beauty and tradition, they are not hung up on the conceptions of innocence that underlie every narrative about the next destroyed Shangri-La.

In the village of Wenhai, a settlement of 800 beneath the often rain-obscured peak of Jade Dragon Mountain, the arrival of cameras last year produced an abundance of photos of the new drinking water system. One villager took a picture of a water buffalo pulling a cart set against yellow flowers. The viewer sees a pastoral scene; the villager is focused on the fact that the cart is full of bags of cement. "Now we know how to use cement and don't have to hire workers from the urban areas," he says.

One of the photographers, He Huanzhen, 50, speaks emphatically of his desire for a road connecting the village to Lijiang, the largest town in the area, allowing more goods to flow to the shelves of the local shop, where a bare light bulb illuminates packages of instant noodles, toothpaste and bottles of Dali beer. He shows a picture of people carrying sections of pipe on their shoulders, another of people carrying in the pieces of a disassembled tractor. He shows a photo of his family threshing grain by hand in their muddy courtyard. "We need machinery," he says. "This is too traditional." He shows a picture of the table saw that one of his neighbors brought in. The whine of its blades now fills the valley.

He is a physician, one of the original "barefoot doctors" trained in the days of Mao to provide a basic level of care in the hinterlands. His green jacket is shredded and fraying, his blue pants worn down to holes. Many of his photographs document his working conditions in a thatched-roof house with a single thermometer and blood pressure machine. In one picture, an old man lies on a bed suffering from pneumonia, a small child sleeping next to him. In another -- a photo taken by his daughter -- He kneels on the porch of his clinic examining a 5-month-old infant cradled in her mother's arms. His doctor's kit, a weathered leather suitcase, is propped on a log. Mud cakes his boots.

For He, every click of the shutter is a kind of political act, an effort to focus the attention of the people who run China on injecting more resources here. He wants more equipment for his clinic -- a stomach pump, tools to extract abscessed teeth, oxygen canisters for respiratory troubles. "We feel our life is very poor," he says. "We were happy to have this camera to show people how we live. It's kind of a tool to report to the local government."

In the village of Xuehua, where Hong Zhengyong grew up, a satellite dish now dominates the courtyard of the family home, its metallic shine strikingly anomalous against its surroundings -- the soot-stained boards of the house, the tattoos on his mother's arms that identify her as a member of this family, the long pipe his father smokes, the scroll he nestles in his hands.

Hong's brother brought the dish from Lijiang last year. Now the television is almost always on, bringing in 18 channels, the sound blasting as smoke from the cooking fire fills the room.

Television! How bourgeois!