Great coffee table book of photographs of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. http://www.red-colornewssoldier.com/toc.html http://www.red-colornewssoldier.com/chapter_fs.html http://www.red-colornewssoldier.com/images/print-04.jpg http://www.red-colornewssoldier.com/images/print-05.jpg http://www.red-colornewssoldier.com/images/print-06.jpg http://www.photonet.org.uk/content/images/3_173_zoq8FCUZbZ-324x267.jpg By Li Zhensheng, "Red-Colour, New Soldier: A Chinese Photographer's Odyssey through the Cultural Revolution, " Phaidon, 2004.
http://www.photonet.org.uk/index.php?id=22,126,1,0,1,0
The photographer Li Zhensheng, spent almost 20 years from 1963 working for the Heilongjiang Daily, a Communist newspaper in Northern China. His unique archive of images conveys the madness of this time - its spectacular, stage-managed public trials, its recantations, its cult of personality, its mass demonstrations, its executions and its re-education campaigns – as seen through the eyes of an exceptional witness. Li, born in August 1940, was initially full of revolutionary zeal and committed to Mao's cause. He set up his own group of revolutionaries on the newspaper called 'Red Youth Fighting Team'. They won official recognition from Beijing, and were sent red armbands inscribed with an ideogram from Mao translated as 'red-colour news soldier' (i.e. 'revolutionary journalist'). The exhibition brings together over 130 of his photographs, along with personal documents, divided into chronological sections from the Socialist Education Movement in 1964 - 65 to the years leading up to Mao's death in 1976.
Li fell victim to bitter political infighting and in 1968 was accused of being 'petit-bourgeois' and a 'foreign agent'. At the end of 1969 he was sent to a 're-education school' in a desolate rural region north of Harbin for two years. He returned to work in 1972 as head of photography at the Heilongjiang Daily, a position he maintained until 1980. At great personal risk, he hid and preserved thousands of photographs in his furniture and under his floorboards. Today, these pictures form the only known existing photographic documentation of the period, from Zhensheng's unique eye. As is stated in a recent comprehensive book on his work: "(Li Zhensheng) was tracking human tragedies and personal foibles with a precision that was to create an enduring legacy not only for his contemporaries but for the generations of his countrymen then unborn…" /2/
-- Michael Pugliese
