While presenting the photography exhibit “Before the Doors Closed: The U.N. in North China after WWII,” Curator of the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies Patrick Dowdey explained the degree of militarization in Northern China in 1947 and 1948.
“Nitrates from animal and human manure were going into producing bombs,” he said. “Everything was going into the war.”
The exhibit contains 32 black and white photographs by Gay Dillion Lund that depict North China during this difficult time in its history. Lund took 600 photographs of North China while traveling with her husband Harry from 1946 to 1948. Harry Lund served as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administrator in North China during the post-World War II years of civil war in that country. The Lund family bequeathed the archive of photos and letters to the University in 1993. Gay Dillion Lund lived in Middletown after her return from China.
“This is a very interesting time, right before liberation when the Communists take control… Probably fifteen years after this, some of these things would be around, by the time of the Cultural Revolution very little [would be left],” Dowdey said.
“What we wanted to convey in this show was the atmosphere and conditions in North China during the Civil War and the role of the U.N.R.R.A., rather than the personal story of Dillon and Lund,” said Liz Khoo ’06, who helped curate the exhibit.
The collection is rare in that few photographs of Northern China from this time exist, and fewer still that were taken by Westerner photographers.
Adelina Halim ’06, Khoo, and Ronald Lim ’06 worked together with Dowdey to choose the 32 photographs for the exhibit. They selected the final prints from the archive of 600 that Dillon took while in China. To prepare the photographs for the exhibit, they made a contact sheet of the negatives, very small pictures that show the main features of the photograph. The contact photos, being quite small, do not show the finer details of the picture. The curators were surprised by what they found after blowing up the pictures.
“We had the negatives, and we had little contact prints that we digitally blew up,” Dowdey said.“We thought the picture was of donated clothes, [but] when we blew it up, [we found] they have characters on them, and we saw that there were pairs of classic North China wool long underwear. They were making these there as a relief project. They were importing the wool and making them there.”
Another surprising photograph features a pagoda in the foreground and a pill box in the background. The curators did not see the pillbox until they digitally blew up the photograph. The pagoda was being used as a grain silo, and the pillbox was built near by to protect it.
“The contrast between the pagoda and the pillbox was a great commentary on the dialectic of social life,” said Dan Chaffee ’05.
This photograph underscores the fact that food became a war material during the civil war.
“The nationalists tried to keep the relief from getting to the communists,” Dowdey said.
Khoo pointed out her favorite photo from the exhibit.
“The farmer with his boy and their donkey in a field [is my favorite],” she said. “I look at that photo and really feel the expanse of the landscape and the harshness of the environment.”
Many of the photographs document the prevailing scarcity the civil war caused and the measures the United Nations and Chinese took to combat it. In one photograph, two children learn to spin cotton next to a loom.
“You see kids working in some of the photos. They [the United Nations] were trying to get industry running again. This was a project; they had to do cotton spinning to be able to be self-sufficient in cotton production,” Dowdey said.
One result of the scarcity was resourcefulness.
“This kid is wearing a shirt that’s made out of a relief sack,” Dowdey said. “You actually see them sewing these in the sewing machine picture over here.”
“Before the Doors Closed: The UN in North China after WWII” will be on display at the Mansfield Center for East Asian Studies (343 Washington Terrace) until May 2.
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