What readers saw in the pages of the official Soviet news weekly Ogunyuk was not terribly interesting. Its photo editor for nearly half a century, Dmitri Baltermants, was a prolific photojournalist himself, but his images and the pictures he selected mostly served as indicators of ideology. Soviet history may be better illuminated by discovering why certain Baltermants shots were censored–then later published–than by dwelling on the historic details they purport to preserve.
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The exhibit opens with snapshots of Baltermants with Ho Chi Minh in 1955, with Castro in 1962, and with Ansel Adams in 1983. His portfolio of political personalities includes pictures of Khrushchev with Mao, Nixon with Brezhnev, and Castro on a snowy sleigh ride in Moscow. “He was allowed to see things the average Soviet citizen wasn’t permitted to see,” says Harbaugh. “He decided what the Soviet people saw beyond the Iron Curtain.” In 1955 he showed Vietnamese peasants executing local landowners.
Baltermants’s best known photo is Grief, a Goya-styled record of the aftermath of the Nazi slaughter in the Crimea. It shows survivors hunting for loved ones in a bleak field near Kerch. By displaying different versions of the photograph, the exhibit demonstrates how Baltermants heightened the mood of the scene by adding tempestuous clouds over the heads of mourners.
–Bill Stamets
