1937 - Japan Attacks China!

1937 Japan Attacks China discusses how history is based on many subjective chronicles, how memory is simply an interpretation of occurrences. History doesn't merely recount events, rather it is a subjective experience, which is continuously constructed and reconstructed. While the Second Sino-Japanese War is often commemorated in China, it's memory is absent in other parts of the world. Many of the stories of the Second Sino-Japanese War have either been lost or remain untold. Yet nowhere in the world did the war last as long as in China, and nowhere, except for in the Soviet Union, were as many people killed. The photographs in this book document the Battle of Shanghai by two photographers, Rudolph Brandt and Joy Lacks. Their work captures an emerging war in it's infancy. Both fearless in their own right, Brandt and Lacks covered the Battle of Shanghai until the end of 1937 which left an estimated 250,000 Chinese civilians dead.

Knowing of Daniel Blau's interest in early journalistic photography, a few years ago Tania Sanabria of Grafika La Estampa offered him an album of 60 photographs taken during the war. Tania's father had recently discovered the album in Mexico. Blau's research revealed that a dedication on the black flyleaf, "To Mr. Amador with most sincere best wishes, Shanghai 1938 from R. Brandt", refers to Armando Cuitlahuac Amador Sandoval (1897-1970). Sandoval was the Mexican Ambassador to China. Rudolph Brandt, we assumed at the time, had simply been the one who gave the album to Mr. Amador. A lucky coincidence occurred with the independent discovery two years later of a series of small photographs taken in the fall of 1937 during the Battle of Shanghai. These prints originated from the archive of the N.E.A. (Newspaper Enterprise Association), and with them appeared a stamp bearing a familiar name: "Photo R. Brandt". The serendipitous discovery of the photographs from the N.E.A. archive was an astonishing stroke of luck that provided overwhelming evidence of who, what, when and where. Within the last three years, we have identified more than a hundred of Rudolph Brandt's 1937 photographs of the war between China and Japan. A majority of them were taken during the Battle of Shanghai between August and November of that year. We also discovered additional photos by Joy Lacks, who now holds her place in the league of brave female photojournalists. Joy accompanied Rudolph on the front lines as they both photographed the conflict. So far we have positively identified about a dozen pictures as being hers.