Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust

1. How a Group of Jews from the Provinces Built Soviet Photojournalism

• 13 • • 1 • How a Group of Jews from the Provinces Built Soviet Photojournalism Shortly after the Russian revolutions of 1917 that tossed out the czars and brought in Communist commissars, the leading Bolshevik, Vladimir Lenin, said that the camera, as much as the gun, was an important weapon the Bolsheviks had at their fingertips to secure the revolution. He recognized the power of images and the modern media to transform people and society and therefore gave photography and film pride of place in Soviet culture. Both film and photography were new artistic and documentary tools in Russia. Although photography had come to czarist Russia in the mid-nineteenth century, photojournalism —the notion of using a camera to document a society for its citizens in a supposedly objective way—was new. Russian photojournalism had its start in 1905, when Karl Bulla, Yakov Shteinberg, Pyotr Otsup, and others used their relatively portable cameras to photograph the first revolution that marked the beginning of the end of the czars. And not coincidentally, many of the early founders of Soviet photojournalism were Jewish. Their tales are not unlike those of the profession’s beginnings in other places. As in the case of Erich Solomon and the rise of “Fleet Street” photojournalism in London, or that of André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle—who later transformed themselves into Robert Capa and Gerda Taro during the Spanish Civil War—and the birth of modern war photography, Russian photojournalism and film was hospitable to an entrepreneurial group of young Jews who were drawn to the field, in part because it was free from the antiSemitism and exclusion typical of other, more established professions. Invented in 1839 in Paris, photography appeared in Russia in the 1840s, at nearly the same time as it did in Western Europe. Alexander Grakov and Sergei Levitsky are generally considered the first photographers in Russia. Levitsky’s early portraits were widely celebrated as stellar examples of this new magical process that could replicate reality like no other medium. In 1862 the first photography store opened in St. Petersburg, and two years later, Photographer (Fotograf ), the first Russian photography magazine, began publication.1 But this new art form and spectral means of documenting the world quickly spread as the technology improved and a market for photography developed. Scientists were some of the most avid consumers of photography, since, for the first time, they could photograph objects and study a frozen image for a long period. Portrait photography was another important form. Although it began as an elite craft, by the late nineteenth century, all kinds of people, from Russian royalty to small-town Jews, were having their pictures taken. There was even a professional magazine for portrait photographers that appeared in 1887, one year before the opening of the first photography exhibition in Russia.2 Of course, photographs of the St. Petersburg elite and the czars’ inner circle were in vogue, but so too were images from Russia’s vast imperial expanses, especially of the ethnic diversity that made up the empire. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Russia’s czars expanded the empire to the south and east. Russian photographers followed these new paths across the country and took photographs of Russian migrants as well as of native peoples in the expanding empire.3 Levitsky’s first experiments with daguerreotype photography were images of the Caucasus, showing that the birth of Russian photography and the expansion of the empire went hand in hand (Fig. 1.1).4 Included among these ethnographic studies from such well-known photographers as Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii were images of Bukharan Jews made in the 1890s.5 Alongside Prokudin-Gorskii was Wulf Jasdoin, a Jewish photographer who photographed the czar and his family and, while he was on an ethnographic expedition, Bukharan Jews.6 The portraitist and Hebrew poet Konstantin Shapiro photographed many of when photography was jewish • 14 • figure 1.1. Sergei Levitsky, Bukharan Jews, late nineteenth century. the great Russian cultural figures of the time, among them Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Anton Chekhov.7 The young Marc Chagall got his start in the visual arts working as a photo retoucher, first for a studio in his hometown of Vitebsk and then in St. Petersburg, after he moved there in 1907.8 Already in the late nineteenth century, we find Jews in the Russian Empire as some of the most important photographers working at the...