The photo I'd like to describe is a black-and-white picture of my grandparents' wedding, taken in Shanghai in about 1958. It's in a wooden frame on the wall of my parents' living room in Nanjing, and it's been there for as long as I can remember.
It shows my grandparents standing side by side in front of a painted backdrop of a garden. It would have been taken in a professional studio, since very few families owned a camera then. My grandmother is wearing a simple dark jacket with a high collar, and my grandfather is in a Mao suit, the kind everyone wore at that time. There are no flowers, no rings, nothing decorative. Neither of them is smiling, because people thought you should look serious in photos.
The photo is quite small, about the size of a postcard, and the edges have turned yellow. There's a fold across one corner, and someone has written the date on the back in pencil.
It's important to my family for several reasons. My grandparents both died when I was a teenager, so it's one of the few clear pictures we have of them when they were young. We have very few photos from that period at all, as many were lost when the family moved. It also shows how much life has changed. When my cousin got married last year, she had hundreds of photos taken, three outfit changes and a drone filming the ceremony. Comparing that with my grandparents' single, serious photo makes us realise how simple their life was. Every New Year, my father tells the story of how they met, pointing to the photo as he speaks.