20 best post-war photos by legendary Soviet reporter Dmitry Baltermants (PHOTOS)
Dmitry Baltermants is one of the few Soviet photographers who received recognition overseas during his lifetime. In the 1960s, his personal exhibitions were held with great success in London and New York; in the Soviet Union, millions of readers of the ‘Ogonyok’ magazine decorated the walls of their communal apartments with the magazine covers adorned with his photos.
His career started in 1939. A mathematician by education, Dmitry Baltermants left science for his love of photography and became ‘Izvestiya’ newspaper’s photo reporter – in this position, he soon left for the front. It was war that wrote his name onto the list of world photography legends. The photos taken during the defense of Moscow, near Stalingrad and in Crimea earned him his fame.
However, in the Soviet Union people started talking about his ingenuity only after the war. During the war, many of his works were rejected from publication with comments like, “Why do you have half a man there!?” The military chronicle required standardized pictures of “glorious Soviet warriors”, while behind Baltermants was the great era of Soviet avant-garde. It formed his visual language, in which he “spoke” to the viewer during times of peace, too. We assembled some of his main works of the post-war period.
1. Testing a new ZIS-110 car, 1947
2. The Red Square, 1953
3. The funeral of Joseph Stalin, 1953
4. Mutual feeding – the custom of Kashmiri highest hospitality, 1955
5. On the roof of Hotel Ukraine, 1957
6. Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, 1957
7. Picking a place for the monument to Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1958
8. Dnieper beach, 1958
9. Children at a soda machine, 1958
10. Drying animal hides, 1960s
11. Olympic champion, weightlifter Yury Vlasov, 1960
12. From the ‘Kolya lives in Moscow’ series, 1960s
13. Waiting, 1960s
14. The main clock of the country, 1964
15. A portrait of a man in front of a Vladimir Lenin monument, 1965-1973
16. In a maternity hospital, 1970s
17. Leonid Brezhnev’s visit to Uzbekistan, 1970s
18. Pipes for a gas pipeline, 1971
19. Portrait of an elderly woman, 1972
20. Not looking back. Two Ilyiches, 1972
