She.Home is a mobile photography and social-network project initiated in early 2013.
The first phase of the project centered on the journey home for Spring Festival in 2013. The participants were women living and working in Beijing who had ties to the Mulan Community. Using the mobile phones available to them at the time, they photographed their journeys home, their hometowns, their families, holiday life, and their everyday experiences in the Changping Beiqijia area of northern Beijing. These images were shared and circulated through Instagram and Weibo, and later entered exhibition spaces.
At that moment in early 2013, mobile photography and social networks still existed in a relatively open and unsettled state. Phones had not yet fully become the content-production machines they are today; Instagram and Weibo still retained a stronger character of personal publishing, immediate exchange, and visibility before unfamiliar audiences. A photograph taken from a train, in a village, beside a dinner table, or near a rented room could move from a personal phone into public space, receive responses, and create new relations between those who photographed and those who looked. She.Home emerged precisely within these technological and social conditions.
The significance of the project lies not only in documenting these journeys home for Spring Festival, nor only in preserving a set of images about lives in motion. More importantly, it altered the relationship of authorship around these images. In the past, photographs of migrant workers, women laborers, and life on the urban periphery were often made by journalists, photographers, researchers, or NGOs from the outside. She.Home, by contrast, placed the camera in the hands of those living these experiences. They decided what to photograph, how to photograph it, how to publish it, and how their images would be made visible.
These images should therefore not be understood merely as social-documentary material, nor should their makers be reduced to subjects of documentation or beneficiaries of a project. They are authors: observers, selectors, and narrators of their own lives. The phone here is not a substandard camera, but a portable tool of seeing. Instagram and Weibo are not merely distribution channels, but early spaces in which personal experience could enter public visibility.
She.Home brings the experience of returning home back from grand social narrative to specific individual lives. Returning home is not only about migration flows, Spring Festival travel, or the urban-rural divide. It is also about the journey, waiting, family, loved ones, children, meals, local customs, exhaustion, joy, nostalgia, and the shifting sense of identity between the city and one’s place of origin. Mobile phone photographs preserve these experiences in fragments, and it is precisely this fragmentary quality that brings them closer to what life actually looks like.