Soviet Cameramen at the Front

VOKS, 1944. Very good. Coverboard plus 60 cards or leaves (one double). Silver gelatin prints pasted to each card. 14 biographical cards featuring portrait of the photograher, name label, and short bio. 2 to 5 photo cards for each photographer, with an average of 3 cards each. Each card 47 cm, with photo portaits and larger photos varying in sizes, being either portrait or landscape. Photo on double-size card (by Shaguin) is 20 x 45 cm. Cover is curled and has some paper attached at top. Some stains or marks on about 4 cards, especially portrait of Lt. Sergei Rodionov by G. Vehl, but few stains affect photos themselves. Tiny pinholes at top indicate the photos were displayed.

These cards were not a publication but used for a travelling exhibit that included London's Williams' Memorial Art Museum in October 1945. A London Free Press article from October 6, 1945 described the photography as "the finest to be brought to this country from Russia during the war."

VOKS (an acronym for the Russian " " or All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries) was an entity created by the government of the Soviet Union in 1925 to promote international cultural contact between writers, composers, musicians, cinematographers, artists, scientists, educators, and athletes of the USSR with those of other countries. Although of Soviet origin, VOKS was in fact an international organization, with parallel national branches around the world. It was frequently criticized by Western government officials and the press for functioning as a communist propaganda organization, and these photos are certainly Soviet propaganda. VOKS was restructured and renamed in 1958, becoming a new so-called "friendship organization" known as the "Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries" which continued to exist until 1992.

Photographer bios give birthdate, brief photographic experience, and war involvement. Photos themselves are mostly war related, showing air raid victims, combat flights, refugees, dead enemy soldiers, portraits of Soviet heros, Stalingrad in flames, building ruins, tanks, warships, an elderly lady knitting socks for servicemen, etc. There are also some pre-war photos featuring sports figures, grain threshing on a state farm in Uzbekistan, fishing in Kamchatka, the U.S.S.R. Agricultural Exhibition of 1939, and so on.

Most of the photographers probably did not become well known outside of the U.S.S.R. However, Arkady Samoylovich Shaikhet (1898 – 1959) is remembered as a prominent Soviet photojournalist known for his "artistic reportage" and for photographs of industrialization in the 1920s and 1930s. During the war he created a series of images of the Battle of Stalingrad, not shown here. This collection includes photos of an elderly lady knitting, an armoured train, and a blast furnace from the Tula Iron and steel Works.

The only female photographer in the exhibit, Galina Sanko (1904–1981), was one of only five women who served as a war photographer during World War II. She was one of the most noted Soviet photographers of her time period and also became known in the West, winning awards both at home and abroad. Her photo of a dead German soldier is one of the more graphic in this collection.