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Retired CSUN Professor’s Images of Post-WWII China
See Light of Day After Six Decades

(NORTHRIDGE, Calif., April 18, 2007) — A photographer’s evocative images of post-World War II life in Tientsin, China, shot with a vintage 1940s twin-lens reflex camera, have rested unseen and unappreciated for more than 60 years.

Not even the photographer, Cal State Northridge counseling services professor emeritus Harold Giedt, had in all that time viewed more than a few enlargements of his work. Giedt attributes the "liberation" of the aging black and white images to the intervention of Northridge’s Old China Hands Archive director Robert Gohstand, who recognized the photos’ historical interest and urged Giedt to get the negatives scanned and printed.

About 30 images of daily life in Tientsin captured by Giedt—then a young Marine Corps infantry second lieutenant—can be viewed from April 30 through August 1 in "Faces of Tientsin, 1946," an exhibition presented by the Oviatt Library’s Old China Hands Archive. A program in the library’s Presentation Room at 11:30 a.m. Monday, April 30, will launch the exhibit. Following the launch, the exhibition will be on display on the library’s second floor.

The images "transport us through a looking glass into a time long passed, but are evocative of the empathy between the photographer and his subjects," said Robert Gohstand. "Harold Giedt displayed a sensitivity and affection for the people he photographed, and it shows."

An "Old China Hand," as non-Chinese persons born in or longtime residents of China are called, Giedt in December 1945 arrived in North China, where the Marines were to officially accept Japan’s surrender.

His unit dealt with the repatriation of Japanese military and civilians, and helped Europeans and Americans who had been confined in POW camps. During the afternoons, however, he was "free to roam about, practice [his] Mandarin Chinese on the street and (take in) interesting scenes of the people and their daily life activities."

When Giedt’s tour with the Marines ended, he returned to the U.S. and began the work of becoming a psychologist. Occasionally, he showed the color slides he had made with a Kodak Bantam 828, but the black and white negatives were tucked away for six decades.

An "Old China Hand" like Giedt, Gohstand said the photographs are representative of the historical artifacts kept in the library’s Old China Hands Archive, established to preserve and publicize the heritage of people from other cultures who lived and worked in China from the 1840s until the communists came into power in 1949.

Program/luncheon tickets are $20. To RSVP or for information about the exhibition, call (818) 677-2638. Visit http://library.csun.edu/OldChinaHands/index.html for archive information.

Cal State Northridge’s Oviatt Library has more than 1.35 million volumes. It also subscribes to nearly 28,000 electronic journals, has more than 11,300 e-book titles and subscribes to more than 2,000 print periodicals. It has an extensive audio and video collection, numbering well over 20,000. The library’s online resources are heavily used, with more than 8.2 million visits to its Web pages and databases annually; and a yearly gate count of more than 1.4 million patrons. It also has an extensive collection of rare books, manuscripts, documents, photographs, artifacts and other archival materials. The Oviatt Library serves as the main research facility in the San Fernando Valley.