the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow (MAMM – MDF) today posted the latest Chapter of a huge photographic sequel to “Our victory-75”, which started in may 9, Victory Day, and renewed once a week ended 24 June, the day of the Victory Parade.
this Project combines photos, videos, maps and mini-movies (up to 5-7 minutes, but generally not more than three). The Museum has done an excellent educational project. You need the night before the exam to repeat the key military operations of the great Patriotic war – please, you here. Want to clarify when and why the Red army back straps, abolished in 1917, see Glaucus “Chase”. Want to know about the girls, which was from 17 to 22, who flew to the “maize” and refused from parachutes until 1944 (in favor of excess supply of bombs), read about the “night witches” of the 46th women’s wing. Want to learn about allied lend-lease sea convoy going from Britain to Murmansk, see the eponymous podpevki. Interested in the Mosin rifle, released in 1891 and the former chief weapons of the militias and infantry early in the war, and then, too, looking about her section.
But it is not only proper digest of historical information, great visual range and selection of topics, like announcing a future videoenciclopedia the Second world war.
in fact, the Museum helps to feel optics photographic look. Without edification and theoretical passages, the project demonstrates the different approaches of photographers, devoting a separate Central administrations of the people, whose eyes we see the long-standing war today. Dmitry Baltermants and Yevgeny khaldei, Arkady Shaikhet and Vladislav Mikosha, Paul Troshkin and Vsevolod Tarasevich, Ivan Shagin and Sergey Shimansky, Robert Diament and Nikolay Shestakov, Georgy Petrusov and Emmanuel Yevzerikhin.
of Course, the list is incomplete. And immediately one may ask: but what about Alexander Ustinov and Anatoly Egorov, Mikhail Prekhner, and Victor Temin, Michael trahman and Yakov Khalip, Mikalai Khandogin and mark Markov-Grinberg? These are just names that immediately come to mind. But it is equally clear that we should rejoice in the fact that it’s a start that the names, biographies, pictures at least fourteen domestic military fotokorra will be known not only by their current colleagues and historians of photography, but everyone who looks on the site.
the Names of some wizards we know from the diaries and memoirs of writers, the war mobilized and called in the tactical edition. So, about Pavel Troshkin, with whom Konstantin Simonov met during the fighting on Khalkhin-in 1939, the writer remarked: “In my memory he remained a man of strong, stubborn and to the extent unrestrained in their work, that it was dangerous to drive”. Troshkin, who, along with Simonov was during the retreat of the Sovietfir troops in 1941 near Mogilev, managed to remove the first padded German tanks. Got out of the shelter and went across the field to the tanks.
“at First low down, and when it came to tanks, Troshkin first I saw them sitting on their haunches. But then he found one of the tanks, the German flag, and forcing the red army to climb onto the tank, shot it at the tank, near the tank, with flag and without flag, generally completely insolent,” – says Simonov clearly not without amazement in front of such silliness. However, the pictures of destroyed tanks, which appeared in “Izvestia”, proving that the tigers can fight.
But the names of many photographers, especially the dead shortly after the war, today almost forgotten, as, for example, Nikolay Shestakov. A great master, he managed to escape to the front as a volunteer, to be a prisoner and escape from it, to war with the partisans, battle of Stalingrad to the German “Leica” and remember his peaceful profession. He finished the war correspondent of the front newspaper.
we Can say that the optics of the front of photographers was not only their personal experiences, but first of all put before them editorial tasks. The portraits of soldiers, optimism and faith in victory, as little as possible of the “horrors of war” seemed to guarantee a positive attitude. But it is impossible not to notice that this gap between reality and its photographic “light version” was partly a way to keep the idea of the norm, that it exists in broken into pieces creepy world.
There is a striking recognition of the cinematographer Vladislav Mikosha to the first period of the war: “the world Seemed dying. He can not, can not exist after all the nightmares and stupidities that took over. So come that same feeling of emptiness. It was in the early hours. Then came the rage. There was a force and hatred. But that is for later. And then there was a distrust of reality”. The “close” gaping void collapse, to assure that somewhere, if not here, there is a “normal war”. The one where “Red army is the strongest”. In other words, photography has become a “fulcrum”.
on the other hand, when shooting tragic stories had problems of ethics. Wrote about them and Simonov, and military photographers. A well-known story, Yevgeny khaldei, who in 1941 was bombed and completely burned in Murmansk. Among protruding chimneys moved a solitary figure of an elderly woman with a suitcase. But when the photographer sent her the lens, she protested: “not ashamed to remove our unhappiness?”. And added not without bitterness: “That is not removed, as our pilots bombed Berlin?”. That day, Yevgeny khaldei had nothing to say. Each of them has its own truth. All he could do was save those pictures of the dead city. Keep ThuOba put them among documentary evidence of crimes against civilians at the Nuremberg trials.
However, even in these tough part of the photographers was able to save his vision. The most vivid proof – pictures of the Leningrad blockade, made by Sergey Shimanski and Vsevolod Tarasevich. Szymanski, with his taste for the heritage of the pictorialists, relieves cold deserted city, like a ghostly vision. This city desolate, frozen, lies under the skies of eternity, where, it seems, do not hear even the metronome. From Tarasevich, who focuses on reportage photography, the space of shifted, got whorules the icings and crumbled ruins of homes. But it is a space where a glimmer of life, which go to fetch water, carry on a sledge the dead wander and go sledding on the “road of life”. Needless to say that the shooting of the two photographers of different generations and different schools complementary?
in addition to photographs for Newspapers, in the project “Our Victory-75” enabled collection of snapshots from the family archives. They are not about parades, conferences and communiques from the front. In short, they are not about events, about people. Here the photographers are nameless, but the characters in the photo often known. The names of these people who starred the whole family, with children, before leaving for the front, sending photos taken before the battle (and sometimes last) to be sent from hospitals to the main news (“I’m alive!”), – open the private space of the memory, which lives in silence, not advertising themselves. Return form and names of people appear, the solution in the past, acts almost magically. The name of these sections was given the simple inscriptions on the cards “Remember me with a smile,” “Home, family”, “I’m leaving. Goodbye!”, “Expect victory!”. In fact, these pictures keep that experience of the war as a personal tragedy and a terrible ordeal, which hardly translates into words. Here it is better to just stop for a minute, and then another.
