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.