MRomanych
1st August 2008, 00:50
From Spiegel Online:
Iconic Red Army Reichstag Photo Faked, By Michael Sontheimer in Berlin
A Soviet soldier heroically waves the red flag, the hammer and sickle billow above the Reichstag. Yevgeny Khaldei photographed one of the iconic images of the 20th century. But the legendary image was manipulated to conceal the fact that the Soviet soldiers on the roof had been looting. An exhibition of Khaldei's work opens in Berlin this week.
It was early on the morning of May 2, 1945 and Yevgeny Khaldei had gone to the Reichstag, the German parliament building in the center of Berlin. Three hours earlier the last German commander left in the capital had capitulated, but there was still sporadic fighting going on. Khaldei had his Leica camera with him -- and a Soviet flag.
The 28-year-old photojournalist, a lieutenant in the Soviet navy, met a young comrade in the burnt-out parliament building and persuaded him to pose on the roof with the flag. Two other Red Army soldiers joined them.
Khaldei used up an entire roll of film, shooting 36 photographs. Various versions of one of them became an icon of the 20th century. It was an image that came to symbolize the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Red Army's victory in both the German and Russian collective memories.
After the war Khaldei became the victim of anti-Semitism in Stalin's totalitarian empire and fell into oblivion. It was only in 1991 that the Berlin artist Ernst Volland came across these photographs by chance in Moscow and decided to publish them in a book. On May 8, the anniversary of the end of World War II, Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau museum is opening a Khaldei retrospective, highlighting the work of the most important photojournalist of the Soviet era.
The exhibition will show photographs from the "Great Patriotic War" -- the Red Army's conquest of Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest and Vienna, the Potsdam conference and the Nuremberg trials. It will also feature photographs of everyday life in the Soviet Union, from before and after the war.
Khaldei was no great stylist. Rather, he was a photographer who captured important moments. He took many brilliant documentary photographs over six decades, and it is unfortunate that he manipulated his best-known image several times -- something he was repeatedly criticized for later on. The complicated story of that iconic Reichstag photograph has now been reconstructed by Volland, the curator of the Berlin show, in a small book.
It tells of how Khaldei flew to Moscow that very night after taking the photograph. When the image appeared in the magazine Ogonjok on May 13, 1945 one detail had already been changed. In reality the soldier who is supporting his comrade with the flag had a watch on each wrist. The Soviet soldiers had looted their way through Berlin when they arrived. Khaldei admitted later that he had scratched out the watch on the man's right arm in one of the negatives using a needle.
'I Forgive the Germans, but I Cannot Forget'
Dark clouds of smoke were added to the sky in another version of the photograph. In the final version there was a new flag, billowing dramatically in the wind.
Although at least three other photographers took pictures of soldiers with flags on the Reichstag on May 1 and 2, 1945, it was Khaldei's image that stuck. Later, when asked about the manipulation, he answered: "It is a good photograph and historically significant. Next question please."
Khaldei saw himself as a propagandist for a just cause, the war against Hitler and the German invaders of his homeland. In the years before his death in October 1997 he liked to say: "I forgive the Germans, but I cannot forget." His father and three of his four sisters were murdered by the Germans.
Khaldei was born in the Ukrainian town of Yuzovka, now Donetsk, in 1917. His mother and his grandfather had already been shot in a pogrom which left him injured. He later said that passports then included the "mark of Cain that you are a Jew."
Before he was fired by the state news agency Tass in 1948, his bosses reproached him for his "low level of education" and lack of "political training." But to him the explanation for losing his job was simple: "The real reason was because I am a Jew."
It was something he had in common with around half of his Soviet comrades who worked as photographers during World War II, as well as with the American who took some of the most memorable images of the war -- the Hungarian Jew Endre Friedmann, alias Robert Capa, one of the founders of the Magnum photo agency. The two men got on well, and Capa gave Khaldei a "Speed Graphic" camera when they were both covering the Nuremburg war crimes trials.
Khaldei, who said that he had an "inner need" to create images, was an avid photographer well into old age. The "Russian Capa," as he is called by photography historians, lived in a one-room apartment in Moscow, which also served as a darkroom. When he received 10,000 German Marks for a book and exhibition in the 1990s he immediately spent it on a Rolleiflex. "I never had such a camera in all my life."
*****************************************
From freerepublic.com:
Iconic WWII photo honored at Berlin exhibit (proto-photo-shop)Associated Press, Jun 15, 2008, A.J. Goldmann
BERLIN — It's an iconic image of World War II: Berlin has fallen and Soviet soldiers are hoisting the red flag over the Reichstag.
What most people don't realize, however, is that the photograph isn't capturing the historic moment. Yevgeni Khaldei staged the scene on May 2, 1945 — three days after the Soviets captured Germany's parliament building.
The picture is the centerpiece of an exhibit — "Yevgeni Khaldei — The Decisive Moment" — that bills itself as the first comprehensive retrospective of the photographer's World War II work.
The show at Berlin's Gropius-Bau museum reveals the extent to which Khaldei's work as a war correspondent and later a staff photographer for Pravda blurred the boundaries between photojournalism, art and propaganda.
For Russians, the Reichstag photo is as potent a symbol of victory as Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal's shot of the U.S. flag being raised on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima is for Americans.
But the Reichstag image was heavily manipulated: Smoke in the background was etched later on the negative, to create the impression the battle was still unfolding.
In another version, a soldier's wristwatches have been deftly edited out lest they give the impression he looted them.
Ernst Volland, one of the exhibit's curators, calls the Reichstag photo "120 percent propaganda" — especially since it was made to order according to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's specifications.
"Stalin badly wanted the combination of Reichstag and the red flag," Volland said.
Another image shows a tank planted in front of the Brandenburg Gate, while a straight line of fighter planes soar overhead. Closer scrutiny reveals that the tank is a cutout from another picture and the planes are painted into the frame.
Khaldei saw no ethical problem with the doctoring. If challenged about a photo's truthfulness, Volland said, the photographer would simply reply: "It's a good photo. I made it. 'Auf wiedersehen.'"
Khaldei toiled in obscurity for most of his life and lived out his retirement in a small Moscow apartment on a modest pension until his death in 1997.
The retrospective of over 200 images was put together by private photography collectors Volland and Heinz Krimmer, who have been instrumental in bringing Khaldei's work to a broader public.
"Khaldei's photos are in every German schoolbook. His images are known but the man behind them is not," said Krimmer. Khaldei never considered himself an artist, and only sold his work in small quantities from his apartment.
Born to a Jewish family in 1917, Khaldei built his first camera at age 12. In 1936, he began to shoot for the Soviet news agency TASS, creating his most memorable images during World War II and its aftermath, notably the Potsdam Conference of Allied leaders in 1945 and the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.
After the war, Khaldei had difficulty finding full-time work because of Stalin's anti-Semitic purges and campaigns.
Only after Stalin died in 1953 was Khaldei hired by Soviet newspapers.
Volland and Krimmer met him in Moscow in 1991 and began collecting his work. Their collection of his images is now the largest outside Russia.
In 1994 in Berlin, they mounted the first exhibition of Khaldei's work and published a book with some of his pictures.
The current show, which opened May 8 and runs through July 28, was supported by Germany's Federal Culture Fund. It will travel to Ukraine this year and a U.S. visit is also likely, though no details have been cemented.
While war photography makes up the heart of the exhibit, it also includes Khaldei's images of Europe in ruins. From the 1950s onwards, his work focuses on workers, politicians and artists such as cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
The curators said Berlin was an appropriate first stop for the tour.
"Khaldei's most famous images were made right around the corner," Krimmer said.
Iconic Red Army Reichstag Photo Faked, By Michael Sontheimer in Berlin
A Soviet soldier heroically waves the red flag, the hammer and sickle billow above the Reichstag. Yevgeny Khaldei photographed one of the iconic images of the 20th century. But the legendary image was manipulated to conceal the fact that the Soviet soldiers on the roof had been looting. An exhibition of Khaldei's work opens in Berlin this week.
It was early on the morning of May 2, 1945 and Yevgeny Khaldei had gone to the Reichstag, the German parliament building in the center of Berlin. Three hours earlier the last German commander left in the capital had capitulated, but there was still sporadic fighting going on. Khaldei had his Leica camera with him -- and a Soviet flag.
The 28-year-old photojournalist, a lieutenant in the Soviet navy, met a young comrade in the burnt-out parliament building and persuaded him to pose on the roof with the flag. Two other Red Army soldiers joined them.
Khaldei used up an entire roll of film, shooting 36 photographs. Various versions of one of them became an icon of the 20th century. It was an image that came to symbolize the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Red Army's victory in both the German and Russian collective memories.
After the war Khaldei became the victim of anti-Semitism in Stalin's totalitarian empire and fell into oblivion. It was only in 1991 that the Berlin artist Ernst Volland came across these photographs by chance in Moscow and decided to publish them in a book. On May 8, the anniversary of the end of World War II, Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau museum is opening a Khaldei retrospective, highlighting the work of the most important photojournalist of the Soviet era.
The exhibition will show photographs from the "Great Patriotic War" -- the Red Army's conquest of Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest and Vienna, the Potsdam conference and the Nuremberg trials. It will also feature photographs of everyday life in the Soviet Union, from before and after the war.
Khaldei was no great stylist. Rather, he was a photographer who captured important moments. He took many brilliant documentary photographs over six decades, and it is unfortunate that he manipulated his best-known image several times -- something he was repeatedly criticized for later on. The complicated story of that iconic Reichstag photograph has now been reconstructed by Volland, the curator of the Berlin show, in a small book.
It tells of how Khaldei flew to Moscow that very night after taking the photograph. When the image appeared in the magazine Ogonjok on May 13, 1945 one detail had already been changed. In reality the soldier who is supporting his comrade with the flag had a watch on each wrist. The Soviet soldiers had looted their way through Berlin when they arrived. Khaldei admitted later that he had scratched out the watch on the man's right arm in one of the negatives using a needle.
'I Forgive the Germans, but I Cannot Forget'
Dark clouds of smoke were added to the sky in another version of the photograph. In the final version there was a new flag, billowing dramatically in the wind.
Although at least three other photographers took pictures of soldiers with flags on the Reichstag on May 1 and 2, 1945, it was Khaldei's image that stuck. Later, when asked about the manipulation, he answered: "It is a good photograph and historically significant. Next question please."
Khaldei saw himself as a propagandist for a just cause, the war against Hitler and the German invaders of his homeland. In the years before his death in October 1997 he liked to say: "I forgive the Germans, but I cannot forget." His father and three of his four sisters were murdered by the Germans.
Khaldei was born in the Ukrainian town of Yuzovka, now Donetsk, in 1917. His mother and his grandfather had already been shot in a pogrom which left him injured. He later said that passports then included the "mark of Cain that you are a Jew."
Before he was fired by the state news agency Tass in 1948, his bosses reproached him for his "low level of education" and lack of "political training." But to him the explanation for losing his job was simple: "The real reason was because I am a Jew."
It was something he had in common with around half of his Soviet comrades who worked as photographers during World War II, as well as with the American who took some of the most memorable images of the war -- the Hungarian Jew Endre Friedmann, alias Robert Capa, one of the founders of the Magnum photo agency. The two men got on well, and Capa gave Khaldei a "Speed Graphic" camera when they were both covering the Nuremburg war crimes trials.
Khaldei, who said that he had an "inner need" to create images, was an avid photographer well into old age. The "Russian Capa," as he is called by photography historians, lived in a one-room apartment in Moscow, which also served as a darkroom. When he received 10,000 German Marks for a book and exhibition in the 1990s he immediately spent it on a Rolleiflex. "I never had such a camera in all my life."
*****************************************
From freerepublic.com:
Iconic WWII photo honored at Berlin exhibit (proto-photo-shop)Associated Press, Jun 15, 2008, A.J. Goldmann
BERLIN — It's an iconic image of World War II: Berlin has fallen and Soviet soldiers are hoisting the red flag over the Reichstag.
What most people don't realize, however, is that the photograph isn't capturing the historic moment. Yevgeni Khaldei staged the scene on May 2, 1945 — three days after the Soviets captured Germany's parliament building.
The picture is the centerpiece of an exhibit — "Yevgeni Khaldei — The Decisive Moment" — that bills itself as the first comprehensive retrospective of the photographer's World War II work.
The show at Berlin's Gropius-Bau museum reveals the extent to which Khaldei's work as a war correspondent and later a staff photographer for Pravda blurred the boundaries between photojournalism, art and propaganda.
For Russians, the Reichstag photo is as potent a symbol of victory as Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal's shot of the U.S. flag being raised on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima is for Americans.
But the Reichstag image was heavily manipulated: Smoke in the background was etched later on the negative, to create the impression the battle was still unfolding.
In another version, a soldier's wristwatches have been deftly edited out lest they give the impression he looted them.
Ernst Volland, one of the exhibit's curators, calls the Reichstag photo "120 percent propaganda" — especially since it was made to order according to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's specifications.
"Stalin badly wanted the combination of Reichstag and the red flag," Volland said.
Another image shows a tank planted in front of the Brandenburg Gate, while a straight line of fighter planes soar overhead. Closer scrutiny reveals that the tank is a cutout from another picture and the planes are painted into the frame.
Khaldei saw no ethical problem with the doctoring. If challenged about a photo's truthfulness, Volland said, the photographer would simply reply: "It's a good photo. I made it. 'Auf wiedersehen.'"
Khaldei toiled in obscurity for most of his life and lived out his retirement in a small Moscow apartment on a modest pension until his death in 1997.
The retrospective of over 200 images was put together by private photography collectors Volland and Heinz Krimmer, who have been instrumental in bringing Khaldei's work to a broader public.
"Khaldei's photos are in every German schoolbook. His images are known but the man behind them is not," said Krimmer. Khaldei never considered himself an artist, and only sold his work in small quantities from his apartment.
Born to a Jewish family in 1917, Khaldei built his first camera at age 12. In 1936, he began to shoot for the Soviet news agency TASS, creating his most memorable images during World War II and its aftermath, notably the Potsdam Conference of Allied leaders in 1945 and the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.
After the war, Khaldei had difficulty finding full-time work because of Stalin's anti-Semitic purges and campaigns.
Only after Stalin died in 1953 was Khaldei hired by Soviet newspapers.
Volland and Krimmer met him in Moscow in 1991 and began collecting his work. Their collection of his images is now the largest outside Russia.
In 1994 in Berlin, they mounted the first exhibition of Khaldei's work and published a book with some of his pictures.
The current show, which opened May 8 and runs through July 28, was supported by Germany's Federal Culture Fund. It will travel to Ukraine this year and a U.S. visit is also likely, though no details have been cemented.
While war photography makes up the heart of the exhibit, it also includes Khaldei's images of Europe in ruins. From the 1950s onwards, his work focuses on workers, politicians and artists such as cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
The curators said Berlin was an appropriate first stop for the tour.
"Khaldei's most famous images were made right around the corner," Krimmer said.