Rural children have a snapshot to treasure

"Because my own tuition was sponsored by a company, after attending university, I have always felt that I should do what I can to help other people," Li says.

He also took several odd jobs in his spare time and saved money for his first single-lens reflex camera. After a year of honing his photography skills, he joined an educational aid trip to a primary school in Qinglong county, Guizhou province, as the team photographer in 2015.

"We went on home visits every day after school. I saw a lot of kids looking at my camera with curiosity and longing, so I asked them if they had seen a camera before or had their pictures taken, and the answer was almost always no," Li says.

"It was at that time that I realized I have no photo of myself at that age. It's a pity that our society has progressed so much, yet the children in rural areas were facing a similar situation. So I started to take photos for them."

The pseudonym Dameng, meng meaning "lovely", also came from the young students who were expressing their affinity for him.

"After I returned from the trip, I received a phone call from one of the kids, saying that he put the photo I took of him and his parents at the bottom of a chest, and he would take it out every time he missed his parents," he says.

"At that moment, I realized that I must keep on doing this, so I kept the name, hoping that whenever it is mentioned, it would remind me why I started on this path in the first place."