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.
The cinematic influence is apparent in his panoramics that he made by carefully recorded sequences, panning his hand-held camera with his arms and zooming with his feet, and then joining images frame by frame. (He also made a series of fascinating self-portraits, or “one-image movies” as Mr. Pledge calls them, that we will feature on Lens tomorrow.)
As a child, Mr. Li’s father, a former steamboat cook, took him to the cinema every Sunday in Dalian, the seaport city where Mr. Li was born, in Liaoning province. His imagination ignited, Mr. Li learned photography at age 16.
He went on to be trained in cinematography at the Film School of Changchun in the capital of Jilin province, in northeast China.
But because of Mao’s disastrous economic policies during the Great Leap Forward and the mass famine that ensued in the early 1960s, Mr. Li found there were no job opportunities in his field. That was when he landed a job as a photojournalist in Harbin, capital of China’s northernmost province of Heilongjiang.
Sim Chi Yin spoke with Mr. Li in his home in Beijing last month. Their conversation has been edited.
You seem to have an extraordinary sense of history and also your place in history. What was your thinking as you documented the Cultural Revolution?
When the Cultural Revolution started, when Mao announced it, everyone was very excited, including me. We were part of a political movement. At the start of the campaign, look at the people’s smiles in my pictures; they were genuinely excited to be part of the movement. But later on, it was like a horse that had left its reins.
In August 1966, I saw the Red Guards attack the St. Nicholas Church and Jile Temple Buddhist temple in Heilongjiang. They were burning sculptures and holy scriptures. There was fierce criticism of leaders, criticism of the monks. I started to have doubts. When I started to waver, I started to take more pictures documenting different sides of what was happening. All of us photojournalists had a saying at the time: we take two types of pictures: “useful” and “not useful” pictures. “Useful” means they could be used by newspaper. “Not useful” means they could not be used by newspaper.
By this judgment, half of the pictures in my book (“Red-Color News Soldier”) or more than that, were not useful. Those of people cheering and studying Mao’s sayings were positive. And then there are those seen as “negative.” I knew they couldn’t be published; I didn’t know when and how they’d be useful but I had a feeling they’d be useful somehow.
I knew about recording history. My teacher had told us: photographers are not only witnesses of history, they are also documentarians of history.
Did you sense that it was dangerous to do what you did — shoot the “negative” side of history, at a time like that?
Of course. But I felt compelled to record the reality — it was history, and I shot it and hid the negatives.
Li Zhensheng/Contact Press Images Ouyang Xiang, son of the former first secretary of Heilongjiang’s provincial party committee, was dragged outside the North Plaza Hotel, persecuted for sending an unsigned letter to the provincial revolutionary committee defending his denounced father. Three days later, he was pushed out of a third-story window of the building where he was held. The official report called his death a suicide. Harbin, Heilongjiang province, Nov. 30, 1968.A press pass was useless at the time because even the committee that gave us the press card was deemed “black” — meaning corrupt. So it was useless. It was much better for me to wear a red armband, like the Red Guards, and no one ever questioned me thereafter.
How did you consciously make “positive” and “negative” images?
Most events I went to there were positive pictures and negative pictures. Some slogans were actually not all that positive but as long the crowd’s mouths were open and fists pumping air — that looks positive in the photographs. And I’d leave some film for “negative,” “useless” pictures.
We were given film each month according to a ratio: for every picture published, we earned eight frames. I would process all my own film. And I did all my own enlargements. I would have to process all the film for the other four guys in the paper too because I was the youngest and the newest on the job. When I was unhappy in the darkroom, I would sing.
I knew I had lots of “negative” frames, so I would quickly dry them and clip them off, to not let other people see them. The only fear I had was the others would complain that I was wasting public resources, shooting pictures that the newspaper couldn’t use — and I would leave the positive ones hanging to dry.
I would put the “negative” negatives into brown envelopes in a secret compartment in my desk. In the spring of 1968, I sensed that I would be [searched] soon, I took batches of the negatives home every day after work. I sawed a hole in the parquet floor at home under desk and hid them there.
My wife stood at the window, watching out. I sawed the floor slowly, for over a week. It wasn’t like now when we have electric drills. I sawed it bit by bit. I needed to hide my things. My negatives, plus two Chiang Kai-shek and Yuan Shikai coins, my stamp collection which had images by Goya of naked women — they were all valuable. Not just my negatives.
Later, I took the negatives with me when I moved to Beijing in 1982 and became director of photography in the journalism department of a local college. I just kept my negatives and kept quiet about it until 1988, when there was an exhibition of Chinese photography and they asked me for images from 1966, 1967, because that’s what they were lacking. I gave them 20 pictures — both “positive” and “negative.”
Li Zhensheng/Contact Press Images On National Day, schoolchildren carried red-tasseled spears and wore Red Guard armbands, parading past a Russian-style department store. Harbin, Heilongjiang province. Oct. 1, 1966.Most Chinese photographers are very obedient to the Chinese Communist Party’s word. But I have been, since I was a student, not obedient. They exhibited those 20 pictures and I won a big prize at that competition.
My Heilongjiang Daily colleagues came to Beijing to see the show. They gasped. They told me, “Li Zhensheng you recorded history as a whole. We recorded only half of history.”
But most of these picture are still largely unseen in China. Your book has not been published in China.
My audience ought to be those who took part in the Cultural Revolution. But also all of humanity. You know, Burma announced that it got rid of censorship recently. I wonder when such a day will arrive China. I think Chinese society, readers, are ready. They aspire to see work like mine which addresses the past. But the party, the system, can’t accept it. And although the book is not published here, many people have it. And many people ask me to autograph it.
I have no worries taking these pictures out now. These are pictures, factual. Not fiction. And I am already 70-plus years old; I have little to fear.
What is the value of us seeing this work now?
As the saying goes, only when you know history can you go into the future. It is the legacy of humankind. Only when you know the past can you prevent tragedies in the future.
I always dream that my work can be published in Chinese in China. It’s such an insult that these materials can’t be shown in China. Some people say I am washing China’s dirty laundry abroad. I say it’s not, I am showing a historical record of a man-made error among humankind.
Tell us about the upcoming London exhibition, and composite panoramics you shot which, as Robert Pledge notes in his introduction to your exhibition, bear the influence of Russian master filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
I studied filmmaking. I was very dissatisfied that I didn’t become a filmmaker.
State news agency Xinhua photographers had panoramic cameras, but I was a provincial photographer. I didn’t have a panoramic camera, nor a wide angle. I had a Rolleiflex with an 80mm, and a Leica with a 35mm and a 50mm.
So I decided to make panoramics by shooting joiners. It was the closest I could get to mimicking a cinema camera. I shot a lot of joiners.
I photograph crowds in overlapping sequenced frames, from left to right, hand-held, with my Leica and more often a small Rolleiflex. I had to estimate correctly how much to overlap. Couldn’t have too much; that could waste film. Then I made contact prints, small 5-by-7 ones, overlapping them in the order I shot them, cutting them with scissors so they matched, then “stitched” them together on the back with cloth-tape.
I shot pictures like I was a cameraman. Push in, pull out, pan, move. But I moved with my legs, not like these days when you have zooms on your camera. Now with my little Sony Nex 7 camera, I can shoot on continuous mode and pan and immediately it stitches it into panoramic instantly. If I had such camera then I would have gone crazy shooting back then! I would have recorded the Cultural Revolution even better! If I could do it all again, I would have shot more of ordinary people’s daily lives. I didn’t do enough of that at the time.
What is the state of Chinese documentary photography today?
Many people, when they saw that my Cultural Revolution pictures won big prizes, they said, “But Teacher Li, we didn’t live in Cultural Revolution, so we can’t take such great pictures.” I remember feeling the same when our teacher showed pictures he’d shot in Yan’an [the Chinese Communist revolutionary base in the 1930s and 1940s].
But this is a naïve way of looking at things. It’s not reality that creates heroes, but heroes create reality. I’m not saying I’m a hero; I always tell my students to shoot what’s around them. No need to track down disasters and wars, but just shoot what’s around them, just pick up your camera today and shoot.
It’s not just old photos that have value. You pick up your camera today and shoot, 20 years later they will become old photos too, and will have value.
Li Zhensheng/Contact Press Images Residents of Acheng Township formed a mass rally to “fight against enemies.” Ashihe Commune, Acheng County, Heilongjiang Province. May 21, 1965.
