Photographer Li Zhensheng remembered for his harrowing images of the Cultural Revolution
Tributes are flooding
in for photographer Li Zhensheng, who documented the violent and tumultuous
years of China's Cultural Revolution in the '60s and '70s. A spokesperson for The
Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, which published a book containing
sensitive images Li once kept hidden under his floorboards, this week confirmed
his death at the age 79 and described his work as "incomparable."
Li's photos represented "the most comprehensive and systematic visual archive" of Communist leader Mao Zedong's devastating campaign, the statement said, praising the photographer's ability to "generate a feeling of empathy about the disaster." Li's agency, Contact Press Images, announced his death with an Instagram post saying that he leaves behind "an inestimable photographic legacy," while the UK's Photographers' Gallery, one of the dozens of institutions to share his shocking pictures with the world, tweeted that his "important work had a lasting impact on everyone who saw it."
Li's photos represented "the most comprehensive and systematic visual archive" of Communist leader Mao Zedong's devastating campaign, the statement said, praising the photographer's ability to "generate a feeling of empathy about the disaster." Li's agency, Contact Press Images, announced his death with an Instagram post saying that he leaves behind "an inestimable photographic legacy," while the UK's Photographers' Gallery, one of the dozens of institutions to share his shocking pictures with the world, tweeted that his "important work had a lasting impact on everyone who saw it."
Li came to
international prominence in the 1990s, when he began publishing harrowing
photos from the Cultural Revolution in Western media outlets. Through a
combination of reportage and street photography, he shone a new light on the
decade-long political campaign responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the persecution of
tens of millions more....
Li was born in 1940 in
Dalian in northeastern China's Liaoning province, which was then under Japanese
rule. He studied cinematography before joining Heilongjiang Daily as a
photographer in 1963. Like many young men at
the time, he was sent to undergo "reeducation" in the countryside,
returning to Heilongjiang province's capital, Harbin, just months before the
Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966. Li's position at a
state-run newspaper gave him the freedom to capture the subsequent turmoil in
rare detail, though a "lack of film, marauding Red Guards and a political
dictate against photographing 'negative' scenes, all conspired to reduce him to
the level of a propaganda functionary," wrote American writer and
filmmaker Jacques Menasche in an
official biography.
He was later denounced
and forced to undergo hard labor with his wife for two years. Yet, rather than
destroying images that painted the period in a bad light, Li kept them stashed
away in his apartment. Among the most
shocking was a photograph of seven men and a woman lined up on their knees in
front of a firing squad, moments before their execution in 1968. Another showed
a provincial governor, Li Fanwu, having his hair shaved in public as he was
made to bow for hours underneath a portrait of Mao… read more and see photos
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