Between 1966 and 1976, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution swept through China, claiming thousands of lives, retarding economic and educational growth and denying citizens their most basic human rights.
Little photographic documentation of the confusing and controversial period exists; photos deemed counterrevolutionary were destroyed.
The only known collection of Cultural Revolution photographs, Li Zhensheng's Red-Color News Soldier, is currently on display at the Center for Documentary Studies.
Zhensheng, at the time a party-approved photojournalist for the Heilongjiang Daily, risked his life to save over 30,000 negatives. The exhibit takes its name from the words emblazoned on Zhensheng's rebel group's armband.
The significance of the exhibit goes beyond its uniqueness.
"It is important for all the reasons documentary work is important," said CDS Exhibitions Director Courtney Reid-Eaton. "It provides an opportunity to engage with a real story about real people, a real time and a real place. It's about fostering empathy and creating connectedness between people."
It's also about learning from history, said CDS Director Tom Rankin.
"It's very beautiful, but it's also historical," he said. "It's one thing to hear stories, but it's another thing to see the pictures. They are a powerful cautionary tale."
The photographs in Zhensheng's exhibit show just how complicated history can be. The variety of experiences he photographed span a wide spectrum, including public humiliation, executions, celebrations, forced labor and rallies.
In one striking photograph a handful of smiling men swim in the Yangtze River, surrounded by giant posters of Zedong. Their swim commemorated the one-year anniversary of Zedong's famous swim in the river, which symbolically marked his recapture of power.
"This could not be told without a photograph," Rankin said of the picture. "It shows a moment in time, a place, a phenomenon that only a photo can transport us to. Photography evokes an emotional reality that is tied to understanding history and culture."
Photography often affects public perception of historical and contemporary events. From the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, photographic evidence has caused changes in public opinion.
"Photography affirms a truth, nice or evil," Rankin said. "It affirms a human experience in a way that causes us to take it seriously."
Today, many of these important photographic truths are captured by outsiders looking in on a society, such as photojournalists airlifted in and out of Darfur. Reid-Eaton argues that an outsider view is just as valid, and necessary, as an insider view.
"I very much believe in stories told by insiders, but I also believe you get a fuller view with many viewpoints," she said. "There is no authority position for documentary work."
Rankin said that an outsider view, like that provided by an airlifted photographer, is necessary but complex, and has the potential for stereotyping and gross generalizations. Work like Zhensheng's, he said, is able to go much deeper.
"You don't just see the horrible things. It's not all so clear, not just good versus bad," he said. "Going back to the swimming photo, it makes you ask yourself, 'If I was there, would I be one of them?' It's the ambiguity-photography has a power in its ambiguity."
Though it has been almost half a century since Zhensheng took his pictures, the exhibit has a sense of immediacy. As China continues to move towards a place of world prominence, work like this is essential, Reid-Eaton said.
This exhibit also provides a background from which to view innovative contemporary art coming out of China, some of which will be on display at the Nasher Museum of Art. Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, opening Oct. 26, will feature 130 works of video and photo by 60 Chinese artists.
"China is a place that a lot of people don't know about," Reid-Eaton said. "[Red-Color News Soldier] gives a context for where those artists are coming from, what their cultural foundations might be."
But the exhibit does more than illuminate the present; it gives viewers the opportunity to step into the past, gaining an understanding words alone cannot provide, Rankin said.
"Photos are not just documents, they're interpreters of moments," he said. "Facts and documents within a photo may not exist anywhere else: a gesture, an expression or posture. History without pictures is in some ways devoid of a certain information, power, resonance or immediacy. With pictures, history does not seem as remote."
Red-Color News Soldier is on view at the Center for Documentary Studies, 1317 W. Pettigrew St. adjacent to East Campus, Sept. 18 to Oct. 29. A public reception will be held Oct. 12 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
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