Zhang Yue sits alone on a windowsill, her cropped hair is orchid white, her skin is infused with light. Porcelain skin may be considered one of the Ten Commandments of Classical Chinese Beauty yet the children at the orphanage where Yue lives don't want to play with an albino. This high-key image by Beijing photographer and journalist Zhang Lijie offers a challenge to what essayist and critic Susan Sontag described as the "sustained look downward" of documentary photography. Typically documentary photographs are monochromatic images that denote objectivity, purity and facticity. The rhetoric of documentary photography is of contrasts. Most often the subjects are the downtrodden, the diseased, the destitute. Yet Lilie, who has been documenting the lives of disabled people in China since 2006, considers her sitters to be "precious, as it is a privilege to confront issues."

European and American documentary photography of disabled people can be traced close to the origins of the technology yet it was not until Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up era that such images emerged as a subject in China. As Wu Hung, an art historian from the University of Chicago writes, "Before then, China had not produced its own Arbus or Stanley Burns." According to Wu, modern Chinese documentary photography emerged from two artistic movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s: scar art and native soil art or rural realism and, by the late 1980s documentary photography was aligned with experimental art. Gone were the triumphant workers, happy peasants, and studious children: Documentary photographers of the late 1980s and into the '90s were concerned with portraying what Wu describes as the "dark side of society:" people with mental illness, physical disabilities, prostitutes and poverty. Yet as a post-80s artist Lijie's work is concerned with expanding the language of Chinese documentary photography. "Traditional documentary photography," says Lijie "needs to change."

As editor-in-chief of Spring Breeze, a national magazine produced by China Press for Persons with Disability, Lijie engages in the current discourse and debate about disability in China with policy makers and advocates for disabled people from a wide range of backgrounds. "The magazine's agenda of promoting the rights of disabled people from a humanist perspective became my agenda." Lijie's photographic work is informed by the old masters of American documentary photography and the founding members of Magnum Photos (in 2013 Zhang received a Magnum Foundation-Photography and Human Rights Fellowship) yet it is Mary Ellen Mark who Zhang cites as her main influence. "I started with the traditional documentary approach using black and white images, the snapshot, but gradually I began to incorporate other visual concepts. It's hard to define the boundary between documentary photography and fine art." Lijie's work may not then be considered 'pure' documentary photography. Unlike the nineteenth-century Danish-American photojournalist Jacob Riis who intruded upon his subjects in the dank, windowless rooms of the Lower East Side of New York City, Lijie spends several hours with her sitters talking about their life stories before she shoots. Often a metaphor, a phrase, or a story from their conversation will find its way into the image. Her sitters and their families also participate in the photographic process from arranging furniture to holding lights and reflectors. "It is my personal view cast upon the sitters. It shows how I see them. It is not strict documentary photography. It is hard to say what is objective or subjective."

In her first documentary series "Angels" (2006-09) Lijie focused on a kindergarten in Tianjin for children with intellectual disabilities yet it was "Sequelae of SARS" (2008-2010), a portrait series that examined the lives of SARS patients who suffered osteonecrosis as a result of receiving an excess of hormones in treating the virus, that attracted attention and awards. Since 2009 Lijie's focus has been on documenting rare conditions. "This project aims to rouse people's understanding and attention," writes Lijie and to "promote the government to solve their difficulties". One of the challenges of documentary photography in China is how images might engage viewers. Since Riis's ventures into the slums of New York City, documentary photography has had a civil function yet in a contemporary Chinese context where civil society is limited it brings into question the efficacy of the genre. Lijie sees her work as engaging in a larger historical dialogue. "There are different sides of history but also social involvement. This has been the responsibility of the documentary photographer since the beginning. From the day it began the photographer has had a duty not just to the present but also to the future."

One area that Lijie aims to explore in a future series is disability and sexuality. During a shoot as part of her series on albinism one of her sitters asked if she could be photographed naked. While disability and sexuality is openly discussed in mainstream Chinese media, it may be a challenge to publish and exhibit such images. "It's such a prohibitive topic even among disabled people or families. But it's a fascinating domain to explore and deserves serious attention and care."

Lijie sees that China has yet to develop a distinct style of documentary photography but maintains that it is a medium that can affect change. "Documentary photography is similar to writing a song or creating a sculpture or a painting but on the other hand it has some unique qualities. Photography has the power to lie or to verify. It all depends on the photographer."

Daniel Vuillermin is a lecturer at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Peking University Health Science Center