Photography Collection - News for Art Buyers

From 9th May the first extensive retrospective of the Russian photographer Jewgeni Chaldej is presented in the Martin's Gropius Bau, Berlin. Jewgeni Chaldej has reported as a photographer extensively about the second world war, the war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Some of these images are world-famous and have become icons of the history of photography. Jewgeni Chaldej got famous not only by his spectacular documentary photographs of the second world war or by the staged image of soviet soldiers fixing a flag at the destroyed roof of the German Reichstag (above), but also by those photographs he took during the Potsdam conference and at the Nuremberg trial. The retrospective presents beside pictures that have never been published as well as early works from the 30s and the late work of the 80s.

Born in 1917 in the Donezk area in Ukraine, Jewgeni Chaldej received his first camera at the age of 13. In 1936 he became a photo reporter at the Soviet news agency TASS. He accompanied the Second World War with the camera since the 22nd June, 1941, the day of the raid of the German army on the Soviet Union. He became the witness of many battles, from the north with Murmansk to the Black Sea. Jewgeni Chaldej experienced as a soldier and photographer the retreat of the German troops and documented the advance of the Russian soldiers on Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna and, in the end, Berlin. With interruptions he worked till the seventies years of the "Prawda". He died on the 6th October, 1997. Jewgeni Chaldej travelled as a photo reporter of TASS across the whole Soviet Union. He took photos of the construction of dams in Siberia, the oil fields of Baku and the wheat harvest in the Ukraine, as well as the political rulers of that time. All photos of Jewgeni Chaldej come from the collection Ernst Volland and Heinz Krimmer as well as from the photo agency Soyuz, Moscow.