The lack of pictures is related to the fact that officials were covering up the existence of the famine from upper government officials and foreign visitors as long as they could.

Now, there is written description as well as numerous witness accounts of famine victims dying from starvation. Here are some excerpts of both written testimony and spoken recollections from witnesses at the time:

In the calamity at Guangshan County's Huaidian people's commune in the autumn of 1959, the commune's average yield per mu was 86 kilos, for a total of 5.955 million kilos. The commune's party committee reported a yield of 313 kilos per mu, for a total of 23.05 million kilos. The procurement quota set by the county was 6 million kilos, which exceeded the commune's total grain yield. In order to achieve the procurement quota, every means had to be taken to oppose false reporting and private withholding, and every scrap of food had to be seized from the masses. The final procurement was 5.185 million kilos. All of the communal kitchens were closed down, and deaths followed. Liu Wencai and the commune party committee attributed the kitchen closures and deaths to attacks by well-to-do middle peasants and sabotage by class enemies, and to the struggle between the two paths of socialism and capitalism. They continued the campaign against false reporting and private withholding for eight months. Within sixty or seventy days not a kernel of grain could be found anywhere, and mass starvation followed.

[...]

When thirteen children arrived at the commune begging for food, the commune's party secretary, surnamed Jiang, along with others incited kitchen staff to drag them deep in the mountains, where they were left to die of hunger and exposure.

[...]

With no means of escaping a hopeless situation, ordinary people could not adequately look after their own. Families were scattered to the winds, children abandoned, and corpses left along the roadside to rot. As a result of the extreme derivations of starvation, 381 commune members desecrated 134 corpses.

- written report to party secretary Wu Zhipu, 28 November 1960, Henan Province

In the last half of 1959, I took a long-distance bus from Xinyang through Luoshan to Gushi. Looking out the window, I could see one corpse after another in ditches along the roadway, but no one on the bus dared to talk about the starvation. I saw a corpse outside the western gate of Luoshan County and telephoned the Luoshan party committee to tell them. Guangshan County had the largest number of starvation deaths--a third of the population, with entire households wiped out. Even with people starving all around them, the leading cadres continued to stuff themselves. While I was staying at the Gushi County party committee guesthouse, party secretary Yang Shouji was treating guests to pisi soup [a local delicacy].

- journalist Lu Baoguo

Among only fourteen work units, including the Yumen petroleum management bureau, the Yumen railway office, the Xibei mining machinery factory, the municipal commerce bureau, and the municipal party school, 3,132 persons are suffering from edema, which afflicts 25 percent of the staff in the most seriously affected units ... The illness has struck workers more than cadres, those employed in heavy physical labor more than those in light work, and those eating at communal kitchens more than those taking their meals at home.

- written report from the Yumen party committee, 11 December 1960, Gansu Province

During last year's Great Leap Forward, romanticism went too far; a girl who was pretty to begin with had too much powder applied to her face. For example, a yield that was clearly 200 kilos per mu was reported as 400 kilos or 500 kilos, and everyone tried to sound better than anyone else, with the more reported the better.

Some of our comrades, for reasons of face, didn't relay the true situation to the upper levels. Let me ask you now: What matters more, your face or ensuring that the peasants get enough to eat!? The last time I came over from Shijian and saw many sick people. In particular I saw a great deal of enema, many people with grossly swollen legs, many women suffering from uterine prolapse and amenorrhea.

If we take the road to impoverishing the peasants, who will take part in revolution? I, Zhang Kaifan, will have no part in it!

What do the peasants get to eat? A family, young and old, gets an average of less than 50 grams per person. Some of our comrades are so foolhardy as to carelessly change the food ration standard without any thought to the survival of the masses. Don't they have any human decency?

- speech from Zhang Kaifan to the Wuwei County party committee, 7 July 1959, Anhui Province

The number of deaths at the three communes and four villages I'm familiar with is extremely alarming. In one, the deaths reached 5 percent, in another 15 percent, and in another more than 20 percent ... Some villages are almost completely empty. I personally witnessed 300 or 400 parentless children rounded up, with around 100 deaths reported.

- letter from Zheng Shaobai to Mao, discovered 2 July 1960, Anhui Province; he was discovered and subjected to violent persecution for writing this letter

You get the idea.

Anyways. So party members were aware of the actual conditions. The thing is, reporting the truth could get you into actual trouble with other officials, who could subject you to struggle sessions and otherwise make your life (and your family's life) miserable.

So people lied, covering up the truth. In Henan, letters were seized and writers persecuted for trying to warn others of famine conditions. People were forbidden to leave their villages. Deaths were miscounted, either by not including the deaths of various groups (non-locals dying in the region, very young children, locals dying elsewhere, etc.) or by reporting them as deaths from other causes such as epidemics (a tactic used in Sichuan Province, blaming unsanitary conditions in communal kitchens for enema rather than starvation). When people (especially foreign journalists) came on official visits to model communes, the government arranged for corpses to be hidden from sight, forbidding the starving peasants from leaving their homes while putting well clothed and well fed people on display, and bringing guests to designated areas to show off how wonderful communism was and how the people were so happy. Government officials purposefully deceived foreign journalists to ensure that favourable reports were being transmitted outside.

Reports did leak, of course. You can't keep people silent forever, and eventually Mao backed off with the Great Leap Forward. But the deception and the cover-up of famine deaths are rather through, to the point that various journalists repotred with great earnest that they never saw any starvation deaths during their visits to China during this period. And if you don't see it, you're not going to take pictures.

Source: Tombstone, Yang Jisheng