"On Their Way To The Front" by Dmitri Baltermants
November 7, 1941
Posted on January 18, 2014
This is one photograph from the Portfolio of 25, the entire Portfolio may be seen on the website.
Dmitri Baltermants was a prominent Soviet-era photojournalist. He was born May 13, 1912, in Warsaw, Poland. His father served in the Imperial Russian Army and was killed in the First World War.
Baltermants graduated from the Moscow State University to become a math teacher, but fell in love with photography and began a career in the field of photojournalism. He was an official Kremlin photographer, worked for the daily Izvestia and was picture editor of the popular magazine Ogonyok.
During World War II, Baltermants covered the battle of Stalingrad, and the battles on of the Red Army in Ukraine, Poland, and in Germany, ultimately reaching Berlin in 1945. He was twice wounded.
Just like his fellow photographers covering the Red Army during the war, Baltermants images were always censored by Soviet authorities in order to select only the ones that reflected on the positive sides of service in order to help boost morale. Some of his most captivating photos were supressed, and became public much later, in the 1960's.
One of the more famous images, called "Grief" depicts a 1942 Nazi massacre in the Crimean village of Kerch. It shows the grief of village women as they search for the bodies of their loved ones. A powerful oversaturated sky above, burnt in during the printing of the photo, makes the image even more dramatic.
Baltermants died in 1990.
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