20 best post-war photos by legendary Soviet reporter Dmitry Baltermants (PHOTOS)

Culture
RUSSIA BEYOND
Dmitry Baltermans gained worldwide popularity thanks to the photos he took during World War II. But, apart from war, a lot of “peaceful” everyday life was also caught in his lens.

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