"Li Zhensheng: Red-colour News Soldier: A Chinese Photographer's Odyssey through the Cultural Revolution"
2004-04-08 until 2004-05-30
Photographers' Gallery
London, , UK

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. Exhibition conceived and curated by Robert Pledge, Director of Contact Press Images (New York/Paris). Co-produced and presented by Patrimoine Photographique-Ministry of Culture, France.

IMAGE
Li Zhensheng
© Li Zhensheng, 1966,
Contact Press Images (1966)

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