More than 140 photographic prints from the 1930s–1960s by masters of Soviet photography. A special section of the exhibition is devoted to works created during the Great Patriotic War (the Eastern Front of World War II).
Photographs taken by the classic of Soviet photography demonstrate clearly the history of the country, the development of domestic photography, and Emmanuil Yevzerikhin’s thoughts as well as the subject of each photo.
The artist’s creative path embodies, within the biography of a single individual, the classical era of Soviet photography. Evzerikhin’s fifty-year professional career — from the late 1920s to the late 1970s — coincided with epoch-making events that naturally found their reflection in the art of photography.
Having developed an interest in photography in the mid-1920s, while still a teenager, Emmanuil Evzerikhin had already established himself as a professional photographer and photojournalist by the early 1930s. This was the period when the principles of Soviet photo reportage were finally taking shape. After moving from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, Evzerikhin became a correspondent for the newly founded trust Soyuzfoto, and soon emerged as an exemplary Soviet photojournalist.
His photographs from the 1930s form a kaleidoscope of idealized images of the Soviet Union, where the rigor of documentary photography merges with the avant-garde influences of previous decades.
Evzerikhin worked at Soyuzfoto until 1939, when he was dismissed for a professional error. Interestingly, even this mistake became a textbook example in the history of Soviet photography, reflecting the aesthetic and ideological tendencies of the time. The incident was connected with the then-accepted practice of "reconstructing the fact" in photo reportage — a method Evzerikhin employed, but which ultimately led to accusations of "gross staging".
With the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, Emmanuil Evzerikhin was invited to join the TASS Photo Chronicle as a war photo correspondent. The phenomenon of Soviet wartime photo reportage has no true analogue in the history of world photography. No other country had such a vast number of front-line photographers; yet the defining feature of this phenomenon was its unifying and all-encompassing idea — faith in victory.
Evzerikhin covered the entire war, taking photographs on the 4th Ukrainian, 2nd Belorussian, and 3rd Belorussian Fronts. He documented the liberation of Donbas, Minsk, Warsaw, Königsberg, and Prague, but the most famous photographs were taken in Stalingrad.
Virtually every classic war photographer has their masterpieces; for Evzerikhin, these are undoubtedly the profoundly emotional "Children’s Fountain in Stalingrad" and the heroically symbolic "Stand to the Death!". When speaking of the fame of these wartime images, it is important to understand that all of them were originally created for the press and other printed media — it was precisely through their wide circulation that certain images became iconic. The artistic appreciation of war photography as a form of visual art came later.
After the war, Emmanuil Evzerikhin continued to work as a correspondent for the TASS Photo Chronicle, remaining faithful to the principles of reportage that had taken shape in the mid-1930s. He photographed the reconstruction of the country, the development of agriculture and industry, and created portraits of leading cultural figures. In 1971, Evzerikhin retired officially, but continued to collaborate with TASS as a freelance correspondent. Times were changing, the country was changing — and so was photography. Photo reportage in the tradition of socialist realism was becoming part of the classical canon, gradually giving way to a new photography marked by artistic experimentation, social engagement, and conceptual approaches.
The only solo exhibition held during Emmanuil Evzerikhin’s lifetime took place in 1977 at TASS. In 2007, a retrospective of his work was presented at the State Russian Museum. The current exhibition at ROSPHOTO is the first one since 2007 to offer St. Petersburg audiences a comprehensive panorama of the artist’s work. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he spent his entire life with a camera in his hands. Writer Konstantin Simonov once observed that "a person who looks at life through the viewfinder of a camera ultimately looks through it into history". Today, each photograph by Emmanuil Evzerikhin stands as a testimony to its era, and the subjects and visual language he developed have become classics of Russian photography.
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