David King is a noted British photojournalist with a special interest in the Russian Revolution and Leon Trotsky. Born in London in 1943, King was art editor of the London Sunday Times from 1965 to 1975. During the 1960s he became interested in the ideas of Trotsky and set out to uncover the truth about his life and work, which the Stalinist bureaucracy had attempted to erase from history. Over the years he accumulated a photographic archive comprising some 250,000 images, including images of the victims of Stalin’s frame-ups.

King has designed many publications dealing with Trotsky and the Russian Revolution including, Trotsky: A Documentary published in 1972 with a text by Francis Wyndham; How the GPU Murdered Trotsky published by the International Committee of the Fourth International in 1976; Blood & Laughter: Caricatures from the 1905 Revolution (1983); The Great Purges (1984); Trotsky: A Photographic Biography, (1986); The Commissar Vanishes (1997);Ordinary Citizens (2003); and Red Star Over Russia (2009).

An entire room in the Tate Modern gallery in London is devoted to King’s Soviet posters.

David Walsh, arts editor of the World Socialist Web Site, described King as "one of the most significant artistic-intellectual personalities of our time."

In a recent interview, "Uncovering the truth about Trotsky and the Russian Revolution "continues to run my life": A conversation with the remarkable David King", published on the World Socialist Web Site, King talks about how he began his work.

"How did I start? I worked for the Sunday Times, and I traveled widely. I was taking photos, collecting photos. I was always interested in left ideas, in socialism. I wanted to get the ideas of socialism across visually to a much wider audience, a much wider audience than there seemed to be at the time. And it's continued.

"I began 40 years ago collecting material out of an overwhelming interest in discovering the truth about what happened to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. I wanted to uncover, through visual means, what happened, to collect visual evidence.

"Suddenly in the late 1960s here, everybody was interested in Trotsky and one or two other figures, as major alternatives to Stalinism. There was a crisis, and people were looking for alternatives. I determined to find out what really happened to Trotsky, who he was.

"When I was growing up, everything to do with the USSR was cloudy, mysterious. I was intrigued. By the time I started on the first book, in 1970, with Francis Wyndham, it was like opening up Pandora's box. In the USSR, I'd ask ‘What do you have on Trotsky?’ Trotsky didn't exist. ‘Trotsky was a fascist,’ etc. It was crazy.

"I hunted around the world, while working for the Sunday Times, searching every second-hand bookshop, library, tracking down friends, relatives of Trotsky. I was trying to piece together the real history.

"When I showed Francis Wyndham the material he said that far from there being no pictures of Trotsky, there were more pictures of him than Marilyn Monroe.

"After that, I started to work in a wider way, with a broader perspective. I became interested in examining the entire Soviet experience. The Stalinist stuff was also banned in the USSR at the time.

"All of this work took on a life of its own. It became an all-consuming passion. It ran my life. Uncovering this history continues to run my life."