Li Zhensheng’s photographs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution are perhaps the most complete and nuanced pictorial account of the decade of turmoil ignited by Mao Zedong.
Mr. Li was a photojournalist for the local paper in Harbin, capital of China’s northernmost province of Heilongjiang. That is where he did his life’s work documenting the Cultural Revolution, taking the “positive” propaganda images of masses whipped up in revolutionary fervor for the newspaper, and also the “negative,” more nuanced, questioning pictures. He snipped those frames off his film and hid them under the parquet floorboards of his house until the revolution ended. He did not show these pictures in China until the late 1980s. Even today, given the sensitivities that linger over the Cultural Revolution in China, his work is more often seen overseas rather than at home.
Mr. Li, now 72, has gotten some attention — at least, outside of China — with the publication of “Red-Color News Soldier,” a book on his work, edited by Robert Pledge, the co-founder of Contact Press Images (Phaidon Press, 2003). By turn memoir, history book and photo book, the 300-page volume — with a red jacket mimicking Mao’s Little Red Book — established Mr. Li’s place in history.
Other images he made for the Heilongjiang Daily in northeast China have surfaced since the book’s publication, again uncovered by Mr. Pledge, who over the years has been sorting through cartons of Mr. Li’s negatives, meticulously kept in little brown envelopes. Some of that as-yet-unseen work will be part of a major photo exhibition opening at the Barbican Art Gallery in London on Sept. 13.
These focus on Mr. Li as “the cinematographer behind the photographer,” covering how he was intent on becoming — and eventually trained as — a filmmaker, a career that was thwarted. That lifelong yearning left a very deep imprint on his photography.
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