OTHER EUROPEAN
Yevgeny Khaldei (1917 - 1997)
Soviet photographer and renowned photojournalist Yevgeny Khaldei covered the events of World War II in a series of compelling photos that were not widely exhibited until the mid-1990s.
Khaldei was born to a Jewish family living in Ukraine in 1917. He developed an early interest in photography and became a photojournalist at a young age. In the first year of World War II, he covered the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland. In October 1941, while Khaldei was deployed with the Red Army, the Germans overran his hometown. Some of the town’s Jewish population—including most of Khaldei’s family—were murdered. Moving with Soviet forces through Europe, Khaldei documented the Soviet experience of war in photographs. Some of his better known images include pictures of the Soviets conquering Budapest, Vienna, and Berlin in 1945.
YEVGENY KHALDEI
Red Flag Over Reichstag, Berlin
1945 / printed 1980's
Gelatin silver print
9.5 x 11.75 in.
Signed in pencil on print verso
Note: There are several versions of this famous photograph. The original photograph shows a cloudless sky. To produce more "drama", Khaldai altered the sky to depict a smoldering city and darkened the photograph overall. Another interesting detail is that in the original, the officer in the bottom right of the image is shown to have a watch on each arm (obviously removed from fallen German soldiers). When this first appeared in Pravda, the photographer was instructed to remove the extra watch because it showed "conduct unbecoming of an officer".
$2,500