This is Jean Loh’s tribute in memory of the greatest Chinese documentary photographer Li Zhensheng born in Dalian 18 August 1940 and who passed away in New York on 22 June 2020 at the age of 80 years old. We can say that Li Zhensheng has “photographed the Cultural Revolution”, as if a revolution that has lasted 10 years (1966-1976) were photographable by one single man. But “photograph” Li did indeed. A graduate of the Changchun Film Institute, Li Zhensheng started photographing the prelude of the Cultural Revolution, when he was assigned to the Heilongjiang Daily as a photo-reporter to cover the 1964 Movement for Socialist Education in the countryside. By 1980, two years after the official end of the Cultural Revolution, he photographed the execution of a woman, a former Red Guard turned corrupted party official, the pictures of her final moments would become the epilogue of his body of work on the Cultural Revolution (*). From 1964 to 1980 then, Li Zhengsheng did photograph the eruption of violence, the mobilization of mass hysteria and its folly, the vicious teenage rebellion against all fatherly figures, the personal and family tragedies and sometimes the unintentional comical absurdities– at times bordering on farcical terror. He had also photographed the dreamlike beauty (the winds) of China’s North East snowy landscape, and the horror of a ten-year long nightmare (the clouds). He portrayed himself as the urbane and mundane city newspaper leading photographer, while sharing with us the sweat and tear of his harsh banishment to the countryside labor camp, revealing the grandeur and the pettiness of people immersed in the illusion of a purposeless revolution. In one word he did photograph the “loss of mind” of a whole nation.
