In 1979, Ren Shulin came to Beijing No. 171 Middle School and began taking the Middle School Students series. He was twenty-five at the time, at the end of adolescence. He took photographs for eight years, leaving a complete record of middle school life in the 1980s.

More than twenty years later, Ren Shulin selected some of these images to be made into a small catalog in the form of a small workbook of coarse paper. The little catalog circulated quietly, and people suddenly encountered their previous selves, a ray of light or a silhouette brought them back to their past youth, silhouette of time.

“The 1980s” was a later name. The beginning of that year began using nostalgic lips to talk about this period. That time was a time of the founding of many businesses, the nation was restoring their energy, and the gradual liberation of thought and life. The youths captured by Ren Shulin‟s lens are adolescents, in the midst of growing up; this is also the nation.

Ren Shulin was born in Beijing in 1954. He graduated from the Photography Department at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, now the Communication University of China. He spent eight years as an appliance repairman and he has shot many technical instruction videos. In 1976 he began to take photographs with Di Yuancang as his teacher. His important works from the 1970s include Model Worker. In the 1980s, he shot The 1980 Beijing Gaokao and Innocent in the 1980s. Ren was an important member of the April Photography Association. Ren‟s most influential works from the 1990s were Miner and Twenty Year-Old Mountain Girl. The works Air, Two Women, and Yunnan Landscape were taken in the last decade.