Tommorow’s Crucifixion by Roye
This startling picture was published in the North London Recorder in August 1938 to a predictably mixed response. Those who might have reacted with outrage in normal circumstances were forced to concede that Roye’s photograph summed up the threat of Nazi chemical warfare better than any run-of-the-mill propaganda shot taken before or during the Munich Crisis. Roye had taken a bet of £100 with the proprietor of the newspaper: could Roye create an image that would result in the paper being reprinted within hours of its publication? Tomorrow’s Crucifixion, the best of a series of photos taken in a North London cinema after an all-night shoot, was the result. Roye won his bet, and also succeeded in creating what has now proved to be, on its rediscovery in the archive,one of the key pre-war photographic images of the century.