The Sunday Mail
We are all familiar with the adage “a picture tells a thousand words”. Its exact origins are disputed, but a widely agreed first published usage is that of American newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane in 1911 when he said: “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.”
It is the kind of adage that comes to mind when one thinks of the towering painting of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square. That painting is one of the most easily recognisable anywhere in the world.
Hu Bei, for the Global Times some years ago, wrote more than a thousand words about this painting and the man who helped create it.
“From 1963 to 1978, on the eve of nearly every National Day, Shanghai-based painter Shen Chongdao would stand on a temporary scaffolding platform in People’s Square for at least 10 days.
“His gray work clothes were always stained with paint. In front of him was a huge canvas on which a portrait of Chairman Mao would gradually appear. Shen was just one of the painters of the Mao portraits that hung in People’s Square . . .
“Every portrait of Mao had to strictly follow the likeness from a black and white photo of Chairman Mao shot in 1964, which was called No 4 Standard Picture of Mao Zedong. The portrait that hangs in Tiananmen Square today was also replicated from this No 4 photo.”
Shen never got fame and fortune for his part in this timeless depiction of Mao. I only came to know his name upon reading Hu’s fascinating piece. (It is titled “The Man Who Painted Mao”, for those who care to look for it.)
The painting tells us much about Mao: a blend of the steadfast and dreamy, the single-minded and broad; all in all the kind of expansive character that can create a new world. There is another political portrait that tells a thousand words.
Most of us at some point have come across Cuban photographer Alberto Korda’s photograph of Ernest “Che” Guevara.
It is everywhere: t-shirts, posters, books and even as body art. (Mike Tyson has a large tattoo of the revolutionary.)
Like Shen, Korda never got riches from that iconic image. But he always revelled in the power of that picture.
The photo was taken on March 5, 1960 at a service for 136 people killed by anti-Castro terrorists.
The streets of Havana were lined with mourners eagerly waiting for the emboldening words of Fidel and Che. Also present were intellectual giants in the form of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Korda said of the moment he saw the Che photo he would capture forever: “I remember his staring over the crowd on 23rd street” and being struck by Guevara’s expression of “absolute implacability”, anger and pain.
It was a split second in which Korda could only take two shots — and one of them lived to tell more than a thousand words. (Again, for those who can be bothered to, the fuller story — as written by Steve Meltzer — can be found under the title “The extraordinary story behind the iconic image of Che Guevara and the photographer who took it”.)
But we also know that a picture can tell a thousand lies. This is something that has become truer with the advent of digital editing technologies and our increasing fascination with style over substance in both politics and culture, and perhaps more importantly, in political culture.
Who can forget that horribly airbrushed 2008 campaign poster of Morgan Tsvangirai that made his face look as smooth as a baby’s bottom when we all know that his pockmarked visage is poetically telling of his ugly politics?
There was another picture this past week, one of Dr Joice Mujuru, sitting in what used to be her office when she was Vice-President of Zimbabwe.
It accompanied what we were told was a manifesto, heralding what was supposed to be the emergence of a new political force that would topple President Mugabe in 2018, and presenting to us the lady who would lead us into this brave new world.
There were two interesting, salient aspects of that picture; aspects that tell the thousand lies to the accompanying claims to political relevance.
The first has to do with something the late Cde Michael Sata of Zambia said of a former VP a few years ago.
The chap had been summarily sacked as VP, something Dr Mujuru can relate to. At a public encounter between Cde Sata and this no-longer-VP, the chap introduced himself as “the Former Republican Vice-President of Zambia”.
Cde Sata chuckled. And then the King Cobra raised his head for the strike: “There is something seriously wrong with you when long after you have been fired you still want to be called former this and ex-this.”
Those were not his exact words, but I believe I have captured the gist of his issue more than adequately.
Cde Sata pointed out that a person who can only live on the glory of past appointments — appointments that ended in failure — was not someone to be taken seriously.
Surely, anyone worth his/her salt moves on and acquires new robes instead of trying to stitch patches over funereal shrouds that tell of a life that once was.
So there was former VP Dr Mujuru, sitting in the VP’s Office, telling the nation she had nothing to do with the system that made her VP — and expecting us to take her as some new creation that has somehow been born of a virgin political mother.
And in that top right-hand corner of that picture that accompanied what was supposed to be a manifesto was the second salient aspect: a portrait that had been cropped out.
We all know who is in that portrait. It is the same man who is prominently displayed in public and many private offices as His Excellency, the Head of State and Government of the Republic of Zimbabwe.
Dr Mujuru owes all she has to the man in that portrait, the man her bungling public relations machine is so poorly trying to edit out.
That man remains in the picture, defying the voodoo of digital editing and revealing the lie to the sudden creation of a political virgin called Dr Mujuru.
That man is the reason why Dr Mujuru was sitting in that office, at a desk below the portrait of that very same Head of State and Government.
We all know where the real power lies. And it certainly is not reposed in poorly airbrushed images.
