Dmitiri Baltermants (1912-1990)

While working part-time for Izvestia, , Dmitri Baltermants learned enough photography to support himself and his mother while studying Mathematics at Moscow University in the early 1930s. He was teaching at an artillery school in 1939 when he was "drafted" by Izvestia to document the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. He would continue to report for Izvestia during World War II as well as for the Red Army Newspaper Na Razgromvraga. From 1945 until his death in May 1990, at the age of 78, Baltermants worked as Staff Photographer, Photo Editor and Editorial Board Member for the publication Ogonyok.

 

The notoriety for Baltermants' combat images came long after the Second World War was over. His most recognizable and most frequently reproduced image Grief, 1942, (an image of Kernch, a Crimean city, that witnessed the slaughter of one hundred and seventy-six thousand of its civilians by Nazi invaders) appeared in the USSR only when it had gained international acclaim and appeared in the German weekly Stern.

The breadth of Baltermants' photojournalistic work really only came into public view after the onset of glasnost. Traveling to China with Khrushchev he had the opportunity to catch Mao Tsetung in more relaxed moments, as well as Fidel Castro when he traveled to Cuba (and the United States) with Brezhnev. During the course of his career, Baltermants photographed every general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from Stalin to Gorbachev. Most of his images were rejected for publication in their own time.

Dmitri Nikolaevich Baltermants was born May 13, 1912 in Warsaw. His father, an officer in the Russian Imperial Army, died in the early days of the First World War. With his mother, he moved to Moscow and grew up during the hectic, perilous days of the Bolshevick Revolution and the Civil War. Perhaps the most significant and formative influence was a family relative--Joseph Hanaovich Dvoretskii, a distinguished scholar of classical civilizations. Baltermants' resultant vision draws on the turbulence of the social and political while elevating the essence of humanity.


The following biographies are from Propaganda & Dreams by Leah Bendavid-Val
available through the ICP Bookstore at www.icp.org

Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956)

Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was born in 1891 in St. Petersburg. His father was a prop-maker in a theatre and came from a family of farm workers, his mother worked in a laundry. Rodchenko attended the Kazan art school from 1910-1914, where he met his future wife, Varvara Stepanova. In 1915 he moved to the Stroganov Academy of Decorative Arts in Moscow, but found himself out of sympathy with its teaching. He became interested in Cubofuturism and began to make non-objective drawings and paintings.

Following the February and October Revolutions of 1917, Rodchenko taught workshops in decorative arts for the Visual Arts Section of the People's Commisariat for Enlightenment (IZO Narkompros) and began to exhibit regularly. In 1920 he met the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, a meeting which led to an important friendship and collaboration. That year Rodchenko also became a member of the Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk), founded in Moscow by Vladimir Kandinsky, and made his first photomontages. In 1922 he designed titles for Dziga Vertov's newsreels and began to use typography and graphic art in poster design and book jackets. The following year he designed the cover and layout for Lef, the magazine founded and edited by Mayakovsky, and made photomontages to illustrate Mayakovsky's poem Pro Eto ('About This'), which was published in 1926; his collaboration with Mayakovsky was to last until the poet's death in 1930. He had also begun to experiment with photography, at first to provide material for his collage and montage work, and in 1924 he made many portraits of his friends, including the now famous series of Mayakovsky. During 1925 and 1926 Rodchenko began to work as a photo-reporter on several magazines and newspapers and as a designer for the films The Journalist (with Kuleshov) and Moscow in October (with Barnett) and for several stage plays produced by Meyerhold. When Lef failed in 1927, Mayakovsky started the monthly Novyi Lef, to which Rodchenko continued to contribute designs, articles and photographs.

In 1928 the exhibition 'Ten Years of Soviet Photography' was held in Moscow and Leningrad, and included the work of Rodchenko. That year he joined and became the acknowledged leader of the 'Oktiabr' (October) group. Shortly afterwards he was first criticized for plagiarism of Western photography and for formalism. In 1930 Mayakovsky committed suicide and the At and Technical Workshops (Vkhutemas), in which Rodchenko had taught or ten years, was disbanded. He was once again accused of excessive formalism in his 'Pioneer' photographs, and this eventually let to his expulsion from the October group in 1931, although the group was soon abolished by the government along with all others. In 1933 Rodchenko and his wife, Stepanova, designed 'The White Sea Canal' issue of USSR in Construction, for which he had taken many photographs. He exhibited at the 1935 exhibition 'Masters of Soviet Photography' and also published some photographs in Sovetskoye Foto. In 1937 he photographed athletics, the circus and the ballet, and in 1939 had an exhibition of his photographs at the Writer' Club in Moscow.

Through his design of posters and magazine layouts, as well as through his very original photography and photo-essays, Rodchenko influenced several generations of photographers and radically altered traditional notions about the role of photography. During the 1930s and 1940s he taught at the Photographic union and was known as a brilliant theoretician. When he died he left many notes and manuscripts as well as his photographs and art work. He more than any other photographer influenced photography in the West.



Boris Ignatovich (1899-1976)
When he was nineteen years old, he joined the Lugan newspaper Severo-Donetski Kommunist as an editorial assistant. In 1919 he moved to the Kharkov newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda and in 1920 became the editor of the Krasnaya Bashkiriya. In 1921 he moved to Moscow to be editor of the Gornyak newspaper and during this time collaborated with Mayakovsky. From 1922 to 1925 he worked in Leningrad as the chief editor of humorous magazines. In 1923 he borrowed camera and became enthusiastic about photography, soon mastering what was to him a new means of creative expression.

In 1926 he returned to Moscow and became one of the leaders of the Association of Photographic Reporters in the Press house. he worked as a photographer on Ogonyok, Prozhektor and Krasnaya Niva. From 1927 he worked as picture editor and reporter for the newspaper Bednota.
The pictures Ignatovich took in the Ramenskoye settlement near Moscow the time of the tenth anniversary of Soviet power first brought him to public notice. Although he was influenced by Rodchenko in his earlier work, he soon found his own style and, when Rodchenko was expelled from the October group in 1931, Ignatovich took over as head of the group, which was dissolved in 1932 when artistic and literary groups were reorganized. During the years 1930 to 1932 Ignatovich made several documentary films, including the show film Today, with a scenario by Esfir Shub, and another about the artist Kukryniksy. During the thirties he was head of the illustrated section of the capital's popular newspaper Vechernaya Moskva and the picture agency Soyuzfoto where he drew together many talented photojournalists and pioneered collectivism in photojournalism. The member photographers did sign their name; the credit 'Ignatovich Brigade' used to appear under the photos.

Ignatovich was the first Soviet photojournalist to take photographs from an aeroplane (Leningrad, 1931) and they were published in the magazine USSR in Construction. From 1937 to 1941 Ignatovich worked on the magazine Construction of Moscow for which he took many architectural photographs. At the beginning of the war, in 1941, Ignatovich was sent to the front as a reporter for the Boyevoye Znamya, the newspaper of the 30th Army, and later in 1943, he was sent as a member of the department of artists from the Grek studio into the enemy hinterland, to document the partisan groups in action.

In the post-war years, Ignatovich devoted himself to subjects new to him—landscape photography, of which he had an exhibition in 1948 called 'The Landscape of My Homeland', portrait photography and colour photography. Exhibitions of Ignatovich's work took place in Prague, Moscow, and Vilnius. His work received prizes at many national and international competitions.


Georgy Zelma (1906-1984)
Georgy Anatonevich Zelma was born in Tashkent in Uzbekistan. In 1921 his family moved to Moscow where he began to take amateur photographs of Moscow and its surroundings with an old Kodak camera.

Zelma received further photographic training in the Proletkino film studio and afterwards was apprenticed to the Russfoto agency which supplied pictures to the foreign press and was staffed by many noted photo-reporters. His first well-known pictures were those of Moscow old town and the toy factory in Zagorsk.

Russfoto sent Zelma back to his native city of Tashkent in 1924 as their Central Asian correspondent. His knowledge of the Uzbek language enabled him to distinguish the unique features of the area and he provided the agency with information and picture reports on various themes of life developing in Central Asian republics, in particular those of education, mechanization and women's liberation. Zelma's first photos appeared in the national press at that time and his rapidly increasing professional experience soon made him into one of the most accomplished picture reporters in the Central Asian republics. Many pictures, such as that of the old man with a radio or of Uzbek women demonstrating, became symbols of liberation from the former tsarist empire.

In the years that followed, Zelma worked for various Moscow newspapers and magazines, including USSR in Construction, Krasnaya Zvezda, Izvestia and the Soyuzfoto picture agency. He still traveled frequently to Central Asia.

While with Soyuzfoto, Zelma was commissioned together with Roman Karmen to produce stories entitled 'The USSR from the Air' and 'Ten Years of the Yakut Soviet Socialist Republic'. (Roman Karmen was later to become known as a cameraman and producer but was at that time a photojournalist.) Both stories were published in the magazine USSR in Construction and arousing great interest. With Max Alpert, Zelma produced a special issue of the magazine about the building of the chemical works in Beriosnikovsk and Solikamsk. He worked for Krasnaya Zvezda for three years, and started working for Izvestia in 1936, producing pictures of expeditions and reporting the building of the Moskva-Volga canal.

From the start of the Second World War, Zelma was a front-line correspondent for Izvestia. He took photographs on many fronts, but his impressive and pictures were of the battle for Stalingrad and ran among the most outstanding photo-reports of the war years.
After the war Zelma worked for the magazine Sovetskaya Zhenshchina for Novosti press agency, and again undertook journeys through the USSR and was the author of many illustrated books and took part in all important photographic exhibitions in the USSR and abroad. He was also awarded high state decorations.



Yakov Khalip (1908-1980)
Y.N. Khalip was born in 1908 into a theatrical family in St. Petersburg. From 1921 he lived in Moscow. After leaving school he attended the State Institute for Cinematography. During his studies he worked in the film showroom of the State Academy of the Arts, and also began to take photographs. Between 1925 and 1927 his inspiration was the work of such well-known photographers as Rodchenko, Shaikhet, Fridland and Alpert. He learnt much from them and during this time was already publishing his own pictures.

Khalip gained his diploma as a cameraman in 1929 and worked as a camera assistant and photographer in film studios until 1931. At the same time he took photographs for the newspapers Pravda and Izvestia, the magazines Krasnaya Niva and USSR in Construction, and for the Soyuzfoto agency. After 1931 he devoted himself entirely to photography.
At the end of the twenties and during the thirties Khalip was one of the younger generation of Soviet photographic reporters. He soon developed the characteristics of Soviet journalism of the period, turning in striking reports on social changes in the nation and expressing a committed interest through his photographs.

In 1938 Khalip took part in an expedition to the North Pole as photographer, to take pictures of 'North Pole 1', a research station led by Ivan Papanin, which was drifting on an ice-floe. He produced an impressive series of pictures, which were well received in the press, and was awarded a medal for his participation in the expedition. From 1938 to 1941 he worked for USSR in Construction. He undertook many journeys throughout the Soviet Union, reporting on the life of the whole nation. His pictures of the Soviet fleet were particularly successful.

During the Second World War, from 1941 to 1944, Khalip was front-line correspondent for the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. From 1944 to 1946 he worked for the Soviet Information Office. His war photographs were a significant contribution to the heritage of Soviet press photography.
After the war Khalip worked for the magazines Ogonyok and Smena, and from 1954 for the magazine Sovetskii Soyuz, which is published in many countries. There were exhibitions of Khalip's work in Moscow in 1967 and 1968, in Czechoslovakia in 1963, 1965 and 1967, in Helsinki in 1975, and in London in 1960. He has been awarded high state decorations.

 

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