Los Angeles 11 June 2007 |
A photo exhibition in California has resurrected images from 1940s China. VOA Mike O'Sullivan reports, the exhibition, called Faces of Tientsin, 1946, is composed of photographs kept in storage for six decades.
Street vendor with little girl in Tientsin, 1946 |
Giedt was no stranger to China. He grew up as the son of a Western missionary in a village in Guangdong province. His playmates were all Chinese and he was fluent in the local dialect. He received additional Mandarin-language training after joining the U.S. Marines. He had worked as a part-time photographer during his college days, and took two cameras with him as he headed for Tientsin in late 1945.
Sampan family in Tientsin, 1946 |
"I would get talking with them, and then ask them if I could take their picture," he said. "And sometimes, especially the adults and the women, would be a little more shy. But after a while, I would say, 'you look very distinguished or very interesting, and people in America would like to know how Chinese look.' And so they would often then say, OK."
Lady with fresh-baked buns in Tientsin, 1946 |
Retired geography professor Bob Gohstand directs the Old China Archive at California State University, Northridge, which is sponsoring the exhibition of 36 of Giedt's photographs. Gohstand grew up in Shanghai's international settlement, and the archive preserves the history of the Western presence in China.
He says Giedt clearly had a bond with the people he photographed because these portraits capture their humanity. Gohstand, a book lover, describes two of his favorites.
Boys reading in Tientsin, 1946 |
Harold Giedt went on to become a professor of counseling services at this university in suburban Los Angeles. He always hoped to show the photographs some day, and that day finally arrived 61 years after he took the pictures.
Harold Giedt (l) with Bob Gohstand |
"I feel that I am working on just a little corner of a massive conservation effort because we live in an age where information simply inundates us every moment," he said. "But we all are products of our individual and collective past. And I find it very hard to make really intelligent sense of the world we live in if we do not consider where came from and what people were like. Harold's pictures are 60 years old. And really, it is like looking through a looking glass into a different world."
The photo exhibition in the Oviatt Library of California State University, Northridge, will run through August 1.
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