Soon after, the family’s fortunes took a turn. In 1959, when Mr. Wang was in elementary school, his father was sent to a labor camp as part of Mao’s campaign to purge counterrevolutionary intellectuals.

That same year, Mr. Wang’s father was accused of being a “traitor of the Party” and killed himself.

As the son of a traitor, Mr. Wang was blacklisted. In 1966, as Mao launched the campaign to destroy China’s “four olds” — ideas, customs, culture and habits — Mr. Wang was barred from his high school’s Red Guards, the paramilitary youth group that carried out the chairman’s purge.

Because of his “bad family background,” Mr. Wang was denied jobs and, for years as a result, the opportunity to find a wife.

“All the doors to love were completely closed to me, even my first crush,” Mr. Wang wrote in the book’s foreword. “After having gone through total despair, I discovered another kind of love: the love of oneself.”

"I recorded this love with my camera,” he added.

At the time, owning a camera was considered a luxury that few families could afford. But when he was 17, Mr. Wang bought a basic secondhand camera for 5 yuan, almost a month’s salary for the average worker.

“We were mischievous youth back then,” Mr. Wang said. “We always had ways to get money.”

After showing a friend how to use the camera, the 17-year-old Mr. Wang asked the boy to take his picture. That photo, the earliest picture of Mr. Wang in the collection, shows a beaming teenager swinging on a pair of parallel bars on a school sports field.