Yevgeny Khaldei
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Yevgeny Khaldei (March 23 [O.S. March 10] 1917 - October 6, 1997) was a world renowned Red Army photographer, best known for his World War II photograph of a Russian soldier placing the Soviet Union's Red flag atop the Reichstag building in Berlin, signifying the fall of Germany. Celebrated as the image is, it was a reconstruction of a moment that had happened earlier but had been missed by the camera (the first persons in the Reichstag were not on the picture). Note that Stalin decided that the true persons on the photo, Kovaliev and his comrade, were not politically correct. So they became Meliton_Kantaria (Georgian like Stalin) and the Russian Mikhail Iegorev. The true protagonists of the photo emerged only after 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR.
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[edit] Life
Khaldei was born in a Jewish family in Ukraine and had been obsessed with photography since childhood, having built his first childhood camera out of his grandmother's glasses. He started working with the Soviet press agency TASS at the age of nineteen as a press photographer.
Khaldei was also witness to several pivotal moments in history and is particularly reputed for his photographs during World War II and the Nuremberg Trials. Khaldei worked with the TASS until 1949, when he was fired due to the growing anti-semitism by the Soviet state. For the next ten years, he worked as a private freelance photographer, focusing on scenes from everyday life. In 1959, he got a job again at the newspaper Pravda, where he worked until he was forced to retire in 1970, again because of his Jewish background.[1]
Khaldei's international fame dates from the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991.
[edit] Works
Khaldei's most renowned photographs were taken when he was a Red Army photographer from 1941 to 1946.
Khaldei's photographs emphasised his feelings for the historic moments and his sense of humour. One of the more famous anecdotes was during the Nuremberg Trials, where Hermann Göring was being tried. Khaldei says about the picture (right), "When we received orders to leave Nuremberg, I asked an American colleague to photograph me with Göring. Göring remembered that, because of me, he had been hit with a club, and hence he always turned his head aside when I came into the courtroom. When he noticed I wanted to get into the picture with him, he put down his hand in front of his face."
While Khaldei frequently staged or manipulated his photographs, he insisted that this was to signify the importance and add strength to a particular event.
His work was also admired by the elites of the Soviet Union and he is renowned for creating commissioned portraits for State leaders such as Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.
[edit] References
- Alexander Nakhimovsky, Alice Nakhimovsky, Yevgeny Khaldei (Photographer). "Witness to History : The Photographs of Yevgeny Khaidei". Aperture (1997). New York, NY. ISBN 0-89381-738-4.
- ^ Grosset, M.: Close up: Yevgeni Khaldei, Enter #3, World Press Photo, January 2006. URL last accessed 2006-10-13.
[edit] Further reading
- Grosset, M.: Khaldei: Un photoreporter en Union Soviétique, Editions du Chêne 2004. ISBN 2-84277-548-1.
