![]() ![]() It was almost not until that point that Russia had a celebrity, in the modern sense – he was the first one. Until you get to this amazing picture of Yuri Gagarin in 1961. “There were no pictures of Marilyn Monroe, or Elvis – there was no celebrity culture. Some of this work served to lift the spirit of the whole country some has been hidden in the archives for a long time, and not seen the light for tens of years after the end of the war.” “The time, when on the verge of life and death, photojournalists created masterpieces. While covering a range of periods, for her the images from World War Two are particularly striking. “This collection saved many photographs from destruction, it was one of the first collections of Soviet photography,” says Katznelson. It largely spans a period from the Russian Revolution to the 1960s, with photos gathered from magazines, archives and picture agencies like TASS. Driven by what Atlas describes as a “quest to collect and preserve images from a time when art was restricted to serve a Soviet socialist agenda”, Borodulin has amassed a collection over the past 70 years that contains around 10,000 images. “Borodulin was a Soviet-era photographer himself, who took a lot of now well-known images of the 1950s to 1970s living in Soviet Russia – predominantly sporting events, anything athletic and generally heroic,” says Burdett. To make, on the one hand, ideologically correct photographs, and on the other, within the narrow limits allowed, to seek maximum artistic expression.” “Soviet photographers produced real masterworks while creating the grandiose myth of Soviet civilisation. I think their activities are akin to heroism. “Sometimes there is a first impression before a completely different picture is revealed when you know its history,” exhibition co-curator Maya Katznelson tells BBC Culture. They stridently proclaim a strong Soviet Union – and simultaneously suggest nuances through experimental techniques. The photograph represents the ambiguity that threads together the other images in the exhibition, which are all drawn from the personal collection of the 95-year-old photographer Lev Borodulin. It’s similar to Robert Capa’s dying solder, it’s the Russian version of it in a way – it’s a classic war picture.” Later versions of the image were retouched: there is one version that shows the soldier with three watches – two on one wrist and one on the other – but most of those in circulation just have him wearing one watch, or none. Subsequently, the Russian authorities decided it wasn’t what they wanted to be seen because it showed the soldiers taking valuables off the German soldiers. “And later, it emerged that at the time the soldiers had taken valuables from dead Germans, and the man in the foreground of the photo was wearing looted watches on his wrists. “That became one of the most historic pictures of the war,” says Burdett. According to the New York Times, Khaldei’s father and sisters had been killed by the Nazis – after seeing the photo of the Iwo-Jima flag raising taken by Joe Rosenthal just over two months earlier, he asked his uncle to create the makeshift flag and took it to Berlin so he could craft his own version of the iconic image. Lacking a banner, the soldiers carried a piece of fabric later said to have been stitched together from three red tablecloths by the uncle of the photographer, with the hammer and sickle sewn on. The early Soviet images that foreshadowed fake news The story of a painting that fought fascism So the photographer went back the next day with the soldiers and restaged it because they wanted to have pictures of the Soviet banner over the Reichstag.” “It was a staged image – but staged for good reasons, because on the occasion when the banner was first raised, there wasn’t a photographer to capture the event. “It has such a great story attached to it, and a sense of mystery as well,” Atlas co-founder Ben Burdett tells BBC Culture. Yevgeny Khaldei’s Banner of Victory appears in a new exhibition, Masterpieces of Soviet photography, at the Atlas Gallery in London.
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