Li Zhensheng died on June 22nd

ONCE HE GOT back to his office at the Heilongjiang Daily and shrugged off his cameras, Li Zhensheng became a busy man. He had to develop his roll of film, and since he was the youngest photographer at the paper the older guys gave him theirs to develop, too. He would sometimes spend hours in the darkroom, singing to himself when he felt hard done by.

With his own photos he had a system. The negatives he hung up publicly to dry were “useful” to the paper. A beaming little girl performed a loyalty dance to Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman, while laughing Red Guards applauded her. A cohort of male swimmers, bare torsos shining, lined up to recite from Mao’s Little Red Book before plunging into the Songhua river, in Harbin, to commemorate the Great Leader’s swim in the Yangzi. A crowd gathered with banners in Harbin’s main square for a speech about “Learning and Applying Mao Zedong Thought”, a crowd so vast that he had taken several shots and would splice them together with backing tape. A statue of Mao was raised on a float piled with sunflowers, showing that the people followed him as sunflowers followed the sun.

Any of those could easily run anywhere in the paper. Since the Cultural Revolution had been proclaimed, in 1966, the Daily had printed only pictures like those. And...