Though I have been quiet on blog front, I haven’t been twiddling my thumbs. Opening this Wednesday, October 18, at Boyden Gallery at SMCM, is a show I put together of Soviet WWII photographs. Those of you that know me, may or may not remember, but these photographs are why I became a photographer, o so many years ago. I wanted to post the Text panels here, as they continue themes that are present in my ideas and my work. Come see the show!
Made History: Important Soviet WWII Photographs
Unlike any century before or after, the history of the twentieth century is entwined with the history of the photograph. With innovations in film speed, camera size, and mobility, the camera replaced painting, drawing, and printmaking as the visual record of historical events—-so much so that, now, it is almost impossible to think of the century’s crucial events, such as World War II, as having occurred in color. Instead, we recall well-known images—-photographs—-and almost always in black-and-white: a color image of an event looks fake, unreal. In this way, black-and-white photographs are imbued with special historical significance. These photographs are not only seen as a record of events but as evidence: evidence that these things occurred, and that the viewer is now a witness to them. With such capability, and potential culpability, the photograph subsequently has been used in a variety of historical contexts and for a variety of agendas. How has the materiality of twentieth-century photographs impacted our sense of fact, of historical documentation?
In her essay from 1985 entitled “The Indelible Image,†Jane Livingston wrote, “ We may find ourselves studying the image, reading it rather as we would a drawing or painting, but with even less credulity…. This odd phenomenon, a kind of suspended belief or emotional distancing when we confront the actual moment recorded in the photograph, suggests a moral problem in relation to photographs of palpably amoral, or immoral, acts or scenes. It is not that the acts or scenes themselves, or even the picturing of them, are altered—but that our reaction to what is seen after the fact, may open questions about ourselves.â€
More recently, the writer Susan Sontag titled an article in the New York Times about the Abu Ghraib images, “The Photographs are Us.†As Livingston and Sontag both suggest, this collapsing of past and present into future viewings affords photography a unique position in its question of complicity between “us,†the viewers, and the event that the photograph reflects. The photographer may be present, but we are left to wrestle with the photograph’s legacy.
This exhibit brings together several important and noteworthy Soviet World War II photographs. The Soviet government was quick to acknowledge the power of the photograph to communicate with a large audience. In the earliest years of Soviet rule, photography and film had been accorded a prominent place at Lenin’s urging. “It is a very good idea to record history through the lens,†said Lenin. “History in photos is clear and comprehensible.â€
Printed in Pravda, the state newspaper (as well as many other wartime-related publications), photographs of the Great Patriotic War were carefully chosen to portray the heroism and defiance of the Russian people during the onslaught of the Nazi invasion in the summer of 1941. Indeed, because of governmental censorship, many of the most well -known photographs in this exhibit were not published until the 1960’s.
In the winter of 1942, Soviet photographer Dmitri Baltermants was on assignment in the Eastern Crimea. While being transferred, he was stopped by a fierce battle between the German and Soviet armies at Kerch on the Crimean peninsula. In the aftermath of this conflict—in which 176,000 civilians were massacred by the retreating German armies—Baltermants witnessed a scene of peasants and surviving villagers searching the fields for family and loved ones. That day he took a series of pictures; one of them, entitled “Grief,†has endured as one of the most powerful visual evocations of the sufferings of war.
When studying the contact sheet and noting the earlier images that led up to “Grief,†we can see Baltermants’ visual journey. He begins by merely documenting this horror—not by trying to comprehend it. Seemingly interested in the creation of evidence, Baltermants focuses his lens on the ground, strewn with frozen dead, and frames his images with little or no horizon, thus giving us a sense of claustrophobia, no hope of escape. Once Baltermants begins, however, to focus his camera on the impact the dead are having upon the living, his photographs change, open out, take on a more universal and abiding scope.
“Grief†is the most powerful of these wider views. It reveals a woman, possibly a mother or a wife, recognizing the face of one of the dead, yet we cannot see this face. For this particular shot, Baltermants alters his framing from a vertical orientation (figurative, more personal) to a horizontal one, thus opening up the space, giving the viewer a wider, more panoramic range in which to situate this scene of recognition, grieving, and sorrow. Beyond the grieving woman there hangs an ominous sky. By combining two negatives in the darkroom, Baltermants added this sky after the fact. For the first time, both versions of the photograph are exhibited here side-by-side. Note how the added sky lowers our eyes onto the photographs unfolding drama. Without it, the eye can wander off into the pure white of the cloudless sky - with it, we not only are visually hemmed in, but sense both the woman’s sorrow and natures’ omnipresent heaviness.
The veracity of this composite photograph seems to be undermined by its constructed truth. And yet, in a sense, any documentary photographer chooses what to frame, how to frame it, and when to push the shutter release. So when does the “truth†of a photograph occur? During the shooting, editing, or printing of an image? When an image is shown to others? When an image is revealed as a “doctored†one? During the war, Soviet journalistic practice allowed for a good deal of latitude with such questions of veracity. Socialist Realism (the official aesthetics) called for the depiction of life not “as it is†but as it “ought to be.â€
With “Grief,†Baltermants created an image documenting an intimate, searing moment of loss that—with the inclusion of a beautiful, terrible sky—speaks to the horrors of war, no matter the nationality or time period.
This photograph remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1965, when it appeared in the Soviet magazine, Ogonyok.
The (De) Constructing of a Modern Day Soviet Icon
Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya is known throughout much of the world, especially the former Soviet world, as an icon of bravery and patriotism, a heroine of the homeland. Killed in 1941 at age 18 during her actions as a Soviet partisan fighter, she has since been memorialized in numerous ways. There is some controversy over the circumstances of her death, but nonetheless she is an integral figure in Soviet World War II culture.
The official Soviet story is as follows: Zoya was caught in December of 1941 by Nazi soldiers in Petrischevo, a small town outside of Moscow. When she was captured, she identified herself to the Nazis only as “Tanya.†She was taken to a nearby house and brutally tortured over the course of next day and night; the owners of the house reported hearing the sounds of her being beaten with leather belts, and her short, stubborn refusals to give up any information. The treatment she received must have been extreme, because even “one of the German officers, a very young man, came rushing out of the room and sat in the kitchen until the interrogation was over, his eyes shut tight and his hands over his ears.â€
From there, she was escorted, barely dressed, to another local house, the home of the Kulik family, who seemed sympathetic to her. They were not able to help her, however, and when they offered her water, were threatened with beating by the German sentry. “When she entered the house, Kulik and his wife saw in the light of the lamp that she had a large bruise on her forehead and welts on her legs and arms. The girl’s hands were tied behind her back. Her lips were swollen and bleeding – she must have bitten them while the Nazis were torturing her…The German soldiers quartered in the house surrounded the girl and made cruel fun of her. Some pummeled her with their fists, others held lighted matches right under her chin, and one man ran a handsaw across her back.†Many times throughout the night, Zoya was marched back and forth outside in the snow, barefoot and in her underwear. In the morning, she was interrogated again, and again refused to divulge information.
The same day, she was marched to the center of the village, with her bottles of benzene (the substance she was using to start fires) and a sign reading “partisan†hung around her neck. There, the Nazis had built a gallows and ordered the townspeople to assemble, but most people had not come, hoping to avoid the gruesome scene. Over a hundred German officers were in attendance, at least one with a camera.
Zoya was put on top of two packing boxes and the noose was placed around her neck. Before she could be hung, though, she called out loudly to her townspeople:
“Hey, comrades, why do you look so glum? Show more courage, fight, kill the Germans!
I am not afraid to die, comrades. It’s happiness to die for your people.
German soldiers! Surrender before it’s too late. Victory will be ours anyway! My death will be avenged. Yes, you are going to hang me, but I am not alone. There are two hundred million of us, you can’t hang us all!
Good-bye, comrades! Don’t be afraid and fight!â€
She was then hung, and the German soldiers did not allow her body to be removed for some time. Later, photos of the incident were found on the body of a dead German soldier, and were published in Pravda in January 1942. Her story did much to galvanize the Soviet fighters, and she received official recognition as a Heroine of the Soviet Union in February of 1942.
In the decades since, Zoya has been the subject of the 1944 film “Zoya†by Lev Arnshtam. Monuments to her can be seen in St. Petersburg, Tambov, Dorokhov, and Petrischevo, and even two asteroids have been dedicated to her name. Zoya’s legacy continues to live on as a symbol of resistance to oppression: the author of the 2002 book “Zoya’s Story: An Afghan Woman’s Struggle for Freedom,†even used the pseudonym “Zoya†in parts of her work with The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.
Later investigations, however, have cast some doubt over the veracity of the official story. Some accounts indicate that local peasants, angry with the policy of “scorched earth†that Zoya was helping to execute, captured her and turned her in themselves, or even stoned her to death. There is no proof that German soldiers were in the area at the time of her death. It is also thought that Zoya was not alone, but rather with another young woman, who was also killed, and yet did not receive any official recognition. Overall, additional facts have threatened Zoya’s status as Soviet saint; still, there is a reluctance to deconstruct her and that which she stood for in the minds of many of her country people.