A wooden boat packed with farmers shoves off into the river mist and heads toward an unknown city and a new and uncertain future.

This iconic image, "Yellow River Landing" (1980), is one of the best-known pictures taken by Zhu Xianmin, renowned for 30 years of photographing the poor farmers who live along the banks of the Yellow River.

He is also renowned - and not always praised - for showing a backward, dark and gritty side of China in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. This Zhongyuan region is worlds away from the bright facades, gleaming lights and smiling people of modern, feel-good China photography.

For years Zhu himself was a master of the carefully staged photo extolling the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

"In China, there are many poor and backward regions, but I choose to be loyal to their real appearance. It is my way of recording the changing times and it is a responsible approach," Zhu told Shanghai Daily in a recent email interview.

An exhibition of his works will be held in Shanghai in June.

Second-longest after the Yangtze River, the Yellow River is known as China's "Mother River" and the Zhongyuan region is often called the cradle of Chinese civilization. Because of frequent flooding and devastation it has also been called "China's Sorrow."

Zhu, 69, calls his vast body of work "Huanghe Ren" ("People of the Yellow River") and he considers himself to be one of them, recording the minute details of their daily lives, the ordinary, the sorrowful, the hopeful and the happy. He himself is known as "the son of Yellow River."

The Yellow River originates in Qinghai Province and flows through nine provinces and areas - 5,464 km - before emptying into the Bohai Sea.

Zhu himself was born in a farming village near the banks of the river flowing between Henan and Shandong provinces. Today, the area is known as Fanxian County in Henan Province.

Like hundreds of fellow villagers, he had no idea why people in cities wore socks with their cotton-padded shoes and as a child he had no idea that apples existed because only jujubes grew in his remote village.

Through his photos of villagers leaving home and going off to cities - heads wrapped in cloth to ward off the sun and a few possessions bundled into a cloth bag - Zhu recalls his own experience of leaving the river cradle and venturing into and new, unknown world.

He was 17 years old when he left home.

"Because of extreme poverty, I decided to look for a way out in cities," he said. After buying a one-way ticket to Fushun City, Liaoning Province, he had only 3 yuan (today 48 cents) left. His only luggage was a paper bag of several diguabing (sweet potato pastries) made by his mother.

He went to a photographic studio and learned photography, which he considered "a divine thing." Then he learned stage photography at an opera theater; he went on to art college in Jilin Province in the 1960s. For 10 years he works at Jilin Illustration, a monthly pictorial magazine.

His black-and-white photos were representative of the political times: a little girl happily holding late Chairman Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book," a female teacher leading enthusiastic children to work in the fields. All wearing Mao badges, the boy in front holds a big picture of Mao. They're all smiling brilliantly. Most photos were meticulously staged.

For his "socialist realism" works extolling the bright side of life, Zhu won numerous laurels.

In 1978, he joined Chinese Photography, a magazine published by the China Photographers Association. There he was exposed to radically different styles, such as spontaneous, free-style photojournalism and humanistic photography. He studied the works of Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith. He remembers photos of refugees on the road in the America during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

"I was overwhelmed by those frustrated, abandoned and helpless people, and those documentary photos shot with great compassion, with no trace of set-up," Zhu said.

He also realized that up to that point he had walked "a crooked road" like many other domestic photographers, who looked only at what was positive and officially approved.

"In the past I shot too many photos that unrealistically magnified things, but photography means you should always be ready to shoot the small things in daily life."

He decided to return to the lands of the Yellow River and "photograph the most familiar and beloved Huanghe people."

He started with his hometown, taking documentary snapshots of farmers. The change from staged photos to spontaneous photography of familiar people was "scary at first," he said. They were all like his family. "I was and I am one of them and I immerse myself in their lives," Zhu said.

But he found that most people were very willing to have their photos taken. Many had never seen a camera before and even wanted to pay Zhu for photos. He declined to charge.

In 1985, an editor at Le Monde saw Zhu's photos and suggested he expand his scope to the entire Yellow River region, taking the broad view of people, history and culture. Zhu agreed. From the Bayan Har Mountains in Qinghai in the west China, to the loess hills and flood plains to the Bohai Sea, he left his footprints.

One of his most representative works, shot in the 1980s, shows a weather-beaten old farmer pouring the remains of a bowl of congee into his mouth - the bowl obscures his face. He has his arm around a small hungry boy who looks up at him with longing, holding his own small bowl. Zhu imagined that the child's bowl contains sweet potato congee, common gruel with which he himself was all too familiar.

He clicked the shutter at the "decisive moment." A director couldn't have arranged the scene better or more eloquently conveyed the message of hunger and insufficient food.

In many places the conditions were disturbingly primitive, the land was harsh; those who worked in brick kilns and tile factories considered themselves relatively well off.

"I hope to do something for my hometown people and leave some memories of them," Zhu said. "People are the most vivid representation of changing times and society. So I eye the common people. They epitomize history."

He found them all simple, kind and hardworking.

Yang Xiaoyan, a scholar in visual communication at Sun Yat-sen Universtiy in Guangzhou, said Zhu positions himself as an audience and observer. "He doesn't shun the scenes and expressions of those living in the bottom of the society," Yang said.

Zhu recalled that every time he shot at one place and returned later, he found changes - sometimes overnight when an old street was being demolished 12 hours after he had photographed it.

Zhu's life changed as well.

Today he lives in suburban Beijing, working in his garden and playing with his dog. He still takes photos and over Spring Festival went back, with his camera, of course, to his hometown on the Yellow River.