On the eve of the 70th Anniversary of the victory in World War II ROSPHOTO presents a solo exhibition of works by Yevgeny Khaldei (1917–1997), a prominent representative of the Soviet wartime photography. The exhibition comprises unique photographic documents from the collection of ROSPHOTO and from the collection of Anna Khaldei, Yevgeny Khaldei’s daughter.

Yevgeny (Yefim) Khaldei was born in 1917 in Yuzovka (now Donetsk). He took his first picture when he was thirteen years old, and at the age of 18 he began to work as a photojournalist for some Ukrainian newspapers. Soon after that his photos started to appear in the Moscow-based periodicals as well. However, Yevgeny Khaldei got himself a name as a Red Army photographer and correspondent.

His oeuvre is considered to be an integral part of the history of World War II. Many people used to view the war through the lens of his photo camera; some of Khaldei’s photographs served as evidence of Nazi crimes during the Nuremberg Trials.

In 1939 Yevgeny Khaldei began working as a correspondent for the Photo Reviews Department of the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. He traveled thousands of kilometers on the roads of war by cars, tanks, planes, ships, reindeers and on foot. On his way from Murmansk to Berlin he took thousands of pictures in Kerch, Novorossiysk, Rostov-on-Don, Kuban, Yalta, Sevastopol, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Harbin, Port-Arthur, Potsdam, at the Nuremberg Trials, in Paris and Cannes.

Yevgeny Khaldei was known for his talent to express the destiny and character of his models in photographic portraits. He created numerous portraits of Soviet military leaders, officers, pilots and sailors – heroes and common soldiers and workers of the home front. Among the highlights of his work are the photographic portraits of the world political leaders Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, which were taken during the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, the meetings at which the post-war world order was shaped. One of the exhibition’s sections is dedicated to the Nuremberg Trials; Yevgeny Khaldei has managed to convey the essence and the atmosphere of one of the most important legal trials in the history of mankind.

The display features over 100 artworks created by Yevgeny Khaldei and his trusty photo camera “Leica” during 1418 days of war at different fronts.