Silent witness to vanishing worlds

In 2004, Ma joined China National Geography magazine. His long-term projects continued alongside his regular work, often through repeated visits on weekends and holidays. Some later became magazine stories, exhibitions and books.

His attention to people with little social power reached back to childhood. Raised largely by his grandparents, he remembered his grandmother as sharp and clear-eyed, yet as a rural woman, she had little say. Those memories left him sensitive to voices kept low. There was also a practical reason: marginalized people at the bottom were easier to reach. He once wanted to photograph coal bosses in Shanxi province, but their doors stayed firmly shut.

Yet Ma did not turn those who opened their lives to him into victims or saints. That balance shaped his photo book Getting a Wife in the West, a project begun in the late 1990s. For more than 20 years, Ma followed men from Central China who could not find wives locally and traveled to poorer western villages in search of marriage. Poverty, disability, demographic imbalance and intense lineage pressure pushed them into arrangements that often resembled transactions.

Ma photographed families and matchmakers bargaining over cash, wrinkled hands reaching toward banknotes, and a blind mother leaning against a wall, weeping after her daughter departed. He did not excuse exploitation, but neither did he divide everyone neatly into villains and victims. The men wanted companionship and descendants; the women and their families were trying to change their circumstances. Desire, pride, calculation and shame could occupy the same room.

"The photograph neither condemns nor praises," Ma once said. "It simply observes."

In 2018, another disappearing world drew him in.

On an assignment in Wuhan, Hubei province, Ma was taken to a Chu Opera troupe hidden among narrow lanes marked for demolition. A sign above the entrance read "Chu Opera Cultural Paradise", with a smaller line underneath: cards, opera and tea.

Ma initially expected only a brief visit.

"To be honest, I wasn't very interested at first," he said. "There are already too many stories about people preserving tradition."