Life
Khaldei was born to a Jewish family in Yuzovka (now Donetsk, Ukraine) and was obsessed with photography since childhood, having built his first childhood camera with his grandmother's eyeglasses. He started working with the Soviet press agency TASS at the age of nineteen as a photographer.
He persuaded his uncle to create a gigantic Soviet flag after seeing Joe Rosenthal's photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima while the Soviet army closed in on Berlin and took it with him to Berlin for the Reichstag shot.
He later took photographs of the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials and of the Red Army during its offensive in Japanese Manchuria.
Khaldei continued to work in photojournalism after the war as a TASS staff photographer, but was reprimanded in a 1947 evaluation:
| “ | After returning to peacetime conditions, he failed to develop himself at all, and at the present moment he is considered a passable photojournalist. . . . The reasons for this are several. First, all the praise that was heaped upon him as a military photojournalist finally went to his head, and he rested on his laurels. His growth as a photojournalist stopped. The other reason has to do with Khaldei's cultural level, which is exceptionally low. | ” |
In October 1948, Khaldei received notice that he was being let go because of the agency's "staff downsizing." Khaldei himself attributed the firing to anti-Semitism.
Khaldei continued to photograph, now working as a freelance photographer for Soviet newspapers, and focused on capturing the scenes of everyday life. In 1959, he got a job again at the newspaper Pravda, where he worked until he was forced to retire in 1970.
His wartime photographs were collected in a 93-page book, Ot Murmanska do Berlina (From Murmansk to Berlin), published in 1984. Khaldei's international fame dates from the 1990s, when exhibitions of his photographs began to be held in the West.
Read more about this topic: Yevgeny Khaldei
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