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By Zhan Yan
BEIJING: The man responsible for our image of
Mao Zedong never actually took a photo of the founder of the
People’s Republic of China. He worked in the dark room, where he
retouched the State leader’s photos or negatives to create the
iconic images we are familiar with today.
Chen Shilin is not as famous as those
photographers who took the shots, but his influence remains from the
portrait of Mao hanging in Tian’anmen Square, to his image on
100-yuan bills. “I can tell you one thing I never told anyone else
before,” the 79-year-old Chen says in his tree-room apartment in
Beijing. “You know the poster of Mao in a field of wheat, with
straw hat? There was someone else in the original photo.
“It was Liu Shaoqi [then vice-president of
China]. I removed Liu’s image and drew some wheat plants in his
place so the picture could be made into millions of posters. Before
this, the photo had been dumped among the discarded files.” The
photo was taken in 1957 and heavily used for political propaganda
during the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976).
Chen started his career as a darkroom apprentice
in 1944, after he was expelled from a leading middle school in
Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, for failing to learn Japanese well
during the occupation of Japanese invaders. Two years later he went
to work at a big photo studio in Nanjing.
He came into contact with many famous people,
including artist Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian) and Yang Yanxiu—one
of the leaders of the Communist Party of China. “I did a lot of
leg work for them,” he says.
Between 1948 and 1949, Chen worked in Hong Kong
and Taiwan for the then famous Hong Kong Daguangming Film Co. and
received training in retouching film, or editing photos. He returned
to the mainland in July 1950, from Hong Kong, and joined the Photo
Department of the national news agency Xinhua, to become a leading
figure in photo processing.
He retouched the four official portraits of Mao.
The first one was cut from a group photo taken in 1950 when Chairman
Mao posed for photos with a group of model workers. “I scraped out
the figure over his shoulder and drew curtains as a background.”
This became the first official portrait of Mao.
The image can be seen on today’s 100-yuan
bills. “Mao was too busy after the foundation of New China. You
could not ask him to sit for a photo and listen to your directions,
‘ look this way, that way’,” Chen says.
In 1949, four photographers were commissioned to
take photos of him, but the quality of the photos was not suitable
for a large-scale circulation because of their poor equipment and
technique.”Our only option was to select one from group photos.”
The tools Chen used in those times were quite
primitive. “I used sharpened clockwork springs and doctors’
scalpels to scrape photos,” he recalls. Other tricks included
special paints, brush pen and chemicals for photo or negative film
processing.
The second official photo was also derived from
a group photo and was repaired and retouched. “The only
shortcoming was that I repaired them so well that the hair looked a
little fake,” Chen says.
The third official photo was processed at the
end of September,1959 after two photographers had been dispatched to
take pictures of Mao—but again the pictures were considered
unsatisfactory.
Nevertheless Chen chose one and began working on
it, drawing in “heavy shades, creases on coats and even a
lampshade visible in the background.” The fourth and final
official portrait photograph was taken in 1964 and is the basis for
the reproduction currently on show in Tian’anmen Square. The
photos were shot in bad light, Chen says.
“The heavy shading on the nose made Mao look
aged and tired. They gave me the photos without saying a word. Who
dare say anything? If you spoke bad words about the photos, you were
taken as talking bad words about Mao. I didn’t say a word either,
and shut myself in the dark room for a week.”
“There was too much retouching that needed to
be done. There was insufficient light, the shadowing and highlights
were blurred and the layers were indistinct. . . Even the eyeballs
and the eyelids were not clearly defined.”
Chen magnified the contrast and improved the
image. When Chen met Mao’s daughter Li Na in 1998, she said the
fourth official photo was processed so well that “whatever
direction you were looking at it from, you felt as if Mao’s eyes
were looking at you.”
“She told me Mao liked it very much and chose
the photo himself.”
Chen also developed a method of replicating
negative films, and helped copy tens of thousands of negatives used
by national media. Today, Chen’s hobby is collecting antique
porcelain. He said the coloration of chinaware has something in
common with photo processing. Also, Chen says, he collects china
because he wants to show his former friends and colleagues in Taiwan
that he is doing well. “They were my childhood friends. They said
you should have stayed in Taiwan instead of returning to the
mainland. You look poor and live in such a small apartment.
“I decided to show them I am not as poor as
they think. I arranged lots of china in my study so no one could say
the owner of so many antiques was not well off. I have just one
shortcoming: Whoever says bad things about the Communist Party of
China, I will argue with them.”
Each time when the Tian’anmen Square painting
of Mao changes, Chen says he visits and takes a photo with the new
painting. But he had no apprentice, and none of his three children
has followed his steps into the profession.
“It demands practice from childhood,
sensitivity towards art and shrewd eyes to discern shade and
contrast on a picture. People do not use these crafts today, they
have computers.” Chen also uses computers and digital cameras, but
he is currently working on pictures of Mao using his traditional
paint and pen and scalpel.
“Computers are good because they can reduce
human labor, but they cannot reproduce the original scenes,” Chen
says.
-- Xinhua
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