Li Zhensheng

Li Zhensheng was a Chinese photojournalist who captured some of the most telling images from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, better known as the Chinese Cultural Revolution. His employment at the Heilongjiang Daily, which followed the party line, and his decision to wear a red arm band indicating an alliance with Chairman Mao Zedong, allowed him access to scenes otherwise only described in written and verbal accounts. His 2003 book Red-Color News Soldier exhibits both the revolutionary ideals and many of the atrocities that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. Li was born to a poor family in Dalian, Liaoning. At the time of his birth the city was located in Kwantung Leased Territory, where Japan maintained the puppet regime, Manchukuo. His mother died when he was three, and his older brother, who was a member of the People's Liberation Army was killed during the Chinese Civil War. Li helped his father, who was a cook on a steamship and later as a farmer, until Li was 10 years old. Li rose to the top of his class despite starting school late. He later earned a spot at the Changchun Film School, where he acquired much of his photographic knowledge. In 1963, he briefly held a job at the Heilongjiang Daily, but the Socialist Education Movement intervened. Li ended up back in the countryside for nearly two years, living with peasants and studying the works of Chairman Mao. Li returned to Harbin just months before the outbreak of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the spring of 1966. A lack of photographic film, marauding Red Guards, and a political prohibition against photographing negative aspects of the revolution restricted what he was able to portray. He soon realized that only people wearing the red-colored arm band of the Red Guards could photograph without harassment. To achieve this, he founded his own small rebel group at the newspaper. Li then photographed horrific acts. His collection includes photos depicting the dehumanizing tactics used by the Red Guards to humiliate or degrade alleged counter-revolutionaries. Some images depict public displays of "denunciations," where the hair of prominent individuals is shaved. The Heilongjiang Daily newspaper had a strict policy in accordance with a government dictate that only "positive" images could be published, which consisted mostly of smiling revolutionaries offering praise for Chairman Mao. The "negative" images, which depicted the atrocities of the time, were hidden beneath a floorboard in his house before he brought them to light at a photo exhibition in 1988. A private museum, dedicated to Li's life and work, was opened in 2017 in Sichuan Province as a part of the Jianchuan Museum Cluster. Li's photos, perhaps the most comprehensive visual documentation of the Cultural Revolution, have become a record of the brutality and ideological fanaticism of those years. He came to international prominence in the 1990s, when he began publishing harrowing photos from the Cultural Revolution in Western media outlets. His photos have been exhibited in more than 60 countries, but efforts to publish them at home have been blocked. He received numerous awards and honors for his work, including the Lucie Award for Achievement in Documentary Photography in 2004 and the World Press Photo Special Jury Award in 2005. Li died in June 2020 in New York, where he had lived since 2014. He was 79 years old. He is survived by his wife Zhu Ying, who was also a photojournalist and his collaborator. He had no children.