A Master Who Made China’s Leaders Picture-Perfect

If anyone in the world would know how to put a pair of Italian shoes on someone in a photograph--or take them off--it is Men Songzhen.

For more than 20 years, Men worked as a photo-doctoring specialist in the notorious photo department of the government-run New China News Agency. Her job was to retouch photos to make revolutionary heroes look more heroic, to remove people from photos when they fell from favor and to put them back when they rose again.

One of her most sensitive tasks was to remove Mao Tse-tung’s wife from a rare photograph of the Long March. Another was putting Communist Party leader Liu Shao-chi back into a photograph when he was rehabilitated after being purged as a “capitalist roader” in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Liu died in 1969 but was not rehabilitated until after the end of the Cultural Revolution.

By far, Men’s most famous work was the cosmetic make-over of a young Mao wearing a military cap with a red star in a 1936 photograph by American journalist Edgar Snow. Men added color to the original black-and-white print, straightened Mao’s shabby uniform and softened his features to give the young revolutionary a kinder, gentler look.

The retouched photograph became one of the icons of the Communist era. These days, laminated prints of this picture dangle from the rearview mirrors of taxis and trucks across China; superstitious drivers favor it as a talisman.

Men, now 61, worked for the New China News Agency at a time when its unsubtle propaganda was widely known, even abroad. Its romanticized revolutionary images inspired American artist Andy Warhol’s ironic Chinese portrait series. More recently, U.S. boxer Mike Tyson had Mao’s portrait tattooed on one of his biceps.

Until recently, however, little was known about the team of artists who faked, enhanced and rearranged photos to serve the Communist cause, especially during the ideological frenzy of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

That changed in 1995 after Men and her husband, retired printer Xing Shuangxi, 64, opened the small Songzhen Picture Repairing Special Technology Shop here in the Chinese capital. The two now do for the private sector what they used to do for Communist Party leaders.

Families who want to eliminate a black sheep from their photo albums now have a place to go. From a small drawer in the shop, Xing pulled a box containing some of the more than 800 doctored photos the shop has produced.

In one example, a couple whose young daughter had died had her image erased from a family photo. A hotel manager whose eyes were shut when he was photographed with Chinese Premier Li Peng asked Men to paint him new eyes, open and respectful. A bald man wanted his portrait enhanced with glistening black hair.

Men said she declines dubious business, such as the student who wanted her to put a smart friend’s picture in his ID card so the friend could take a college entrance exam for him, or the man who wanted her to put a fake license plate on a photo of his car.

Since they opened their shop, Men and Xing have been featured in occasional newspaper articles and television profiles, in which Men’s role as one of China’s master photo doctors was gradually unveiled.

The official Chinese media have concentrated on Men’s benign efforts to restore images of once politically incorrect people who had “disappeared” from photographs and has not dwelt too much on her earlier efforts to eliminate images of these people when they were out of favor. “Repairing the Regrets of History,” announced the front-page headline on a story about Men.

For her part, Men said in an interview last week that her special talent was retouching and coloring photographs to make China’s great leaders look even greater. She recalled with a smile the day in 1968, during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution, when she was assigned to the Military Museum of the Chinese Revolution to “repair” photographs.

“I clearly remember it was Dec. 26, the birthday of Chairman Mao, when I went to the museum,” said Men, who trained for 14 years before doctoring her first official photo. “I had a high fever, but I was so excited that I couldn’t rest. What a great and honorable job--repairing the pictures of the great revolutionaries.”

Men, who retired from the news agency in 1992, claimed that she never faked a photograph but admitted eliminating people from backgrounds so that the images of the senior leaders could be enhanced.

“It is much more difficult to fake a picture than to restore it,” Men said.

How difficult would it be to put a pair of size 12 Bruno Magli shoes on a former football player? she was asked by a reporter, referring to the shoe-photo controversy in the O.J. Simpson trial.

“I could do it,” said Men, studying a newspaper photograph of the Italian shoes that Simpson testified were too ugly to wear. “But any expert like me could tell if the photo was faked.”