“ONE WHO OBSERVES LIFE THROUGH A CAMERA’S EYE IS, IN THE FINAL SENSE, LOOKING INTO HISTORY”

After the war, Emmanuil Evzerikhin continued working as a correspondent for the TASS Photo Chronicle. In the 1950s, debates over photojournalism and artistic photography flared up once again. In part, these discussions echoed the rhetoric of the late 1920s and early 1930s — attempts to reconcile documentary and artistic approaches, questions of the primacy of reportage, and the possibilities and limits of staged photography. However, the theoretical explorations of the 1950s were marked by a more substantial understanding of the principles of photojournalism, which by that time had already become canonical.

Emmanuil Evzerikhin remained faithful to the principles of reportage formed in the mid-1930s, and many of his postwar photographs could easily be mistaken for prewar images. He photographed the country’s reconstruction, the development of agriculture and industry, and traveled extensively on assignments.

Evzerikhin’s Moscow of the 1950s–1960s is perhaps less cheerful but more majestic and austere; his perfectly composed and carefully considered images show the construction of Stalinist high-rises, the work and power of factories, new automobiles, and people at work.