After the Cultural Revolution in China, here emerged a photographic style which is different from the political ideological propaganda and paying attention to the daily life of the Chinese people at the bottom from an individual and a private perspective. That is the revival of documentary photography. In the more than 30 years since the Chinese society was transformed, documentary photography, through continuous attention to the civilian especially those at the bottom, fully represents the living conditions of such people in front of the general public, thus it indirectly promotes the development of Chinese society. In the fields of literary arts and media culture, media forms like literary analysis, drama, television and news have already had many influential research results on the transitional society in China, as well as on the reproduction of the image of civilian and civilian consciousness. However, very few researches focus on the documentary photography from the visual images, especially living conditions of the poor people in the lowest level of the society, and study the deep humane care and humanistic values that such documentary photography shows. This article takes Lv Nan's photographic collection "The Forgotten Person" as the main research object, examining the development of contemporary documentary photography in China.