MCLC: panoramic view of the CR

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Costas Kouremenos <enaskitis at gmail.com>
Subject: panoramic view of the CR
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (9/10/12):
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/through-a-thwarted-cinematographer
s-eye-chinas-cultural-revolution/

A Panoramic View of China’s Cultural Revolution
By SIM CHI YIN (NYT)

Li Zhensheng’s photographs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
<http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/cultural
_revolution/index.html> 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
<http://red-colornewssoldier.com/>,” a book on his work, edited by Robert
Pledge, the co-founder of Contact Press Images
<http://www.contactpressimages.com/> (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
<http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=13613> 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
<http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/with-extra-frames-a-chinese-photo
grapher-looks-inward/> 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.
________________________________________

Q. 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?

A. 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.

Q. Did you sense that it was dangerous to do what you did — shoot the
“negative” side of history, at a time like that?

A.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.

Q. How did you consciously make “positive” and “negative” images?

A. 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.”

Q. But most of these picture are still largely unseen in China. Your book
has not been published in China.

A. 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.

Q. What is the value of us seeing this work now?

A. 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.

Q. 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.

A. 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.

Q. What is the state of Chinese documentary photography today?

A. 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.