With the 10th National Memorial Day for victims of the Nanjing Massacre upcoming, on 13 December, so annual attention turns to the atrocities in Nanjing of 1937, this year being marked by the release of newly-discovered evidence thereof.
The historical materials in question include a slideshow made of photos of the headquarters of the International Committee of the Nanjing Safety Zone and a postcard mailed by Japanese soldiers from Nanjing on New Year’s Day, 1938.
As the Yangtze Evening News reported yesterday, 29 November, the colour photos of the headquarters in glass-slide format are being revealed for the first time.
The image in the slide, by its very nature, is semi-transparent, and appears to be have been produced using the Autochrome Lumière colour photography process
As per the Preservation Self-Assessment Program at the University of Illinois, “An autochrome is a colour transparency supported on a glass plate with an image composed of an irregular ‘screen’ of dyed starch grains”.
The grains utilised for the autochrome process were red-orange, blue-violet and green; the very same colours present in the photo which has emerged of the Safety Zone headquarters. The dyes in the image are also distorted, a common phenomenon found in autochrome images.
While it was a very popular format, thought of as portraying “the colour of dreams”, by the late 1930s autochrome was falling out of favour, as subtractive colour film took hold.
The question is now therefore why the autochrome format was chosen to record these images of the Nanjing Massacre. That it was likely all that was available at the time may also be turning out to be the very reason the images have survived to this day.
Lu Yanming has a PhD in history from Nanjing University and is a researcher at the Red Culture Institute of Changzhou University. While scholars are yet to verify, Lu believes it is possible that George Fitch used this slide format to accompany his post-war lectures in the USA on the Massacre, and that the format may well have helped in evading searches by the Japanese army.
