Epilogue

In this final section of the book, the author describes the process of trying to learn more about the subject of Dmitri Baltermants’s iconic photograph Grief, P. Ivanova. Technology allowed him to conduct research in Russia even though he has not been to the country since 2008, when he felt unsafe returning to Putin’s Russia, which had become increasingly xenophobic and homophobic. The epilogue closes with a meditation on how wartime photographs from the antitank trench are used in contemporary rituals of the Kerch Jewish community. The author ponders whether Grief will one day be incorporated into these local rituals.

Seeing the Holocaust in Grief

In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited its new acquisition, Grief, alongside iconic photographs of camp survivors. It also appeared in major photography exhibitions related to war and atrocities. Baltermants’s Kerch photographs, including Grief, are also in Holocaust archives in Washington, DC, and Jerusalem. The author returns to the wartime crime scene in Kerch, where locals have commemorated the mass atrocity at the trench ever since the war. In 1975, an obelisk was erected at its southern end as a site of public mourning, and in 2010, a black granite sculpture was installed emphasizing the Jewish nature of the tragedy that took place there. The chapter concludes with contemporary researchers for Yad Vashem and Paris-based Yahad in Unum photographing sites of the “Holocaust by bullets,” in this case at the trench that Baltermants and other Soviet photojournalists came across in early 1942.

How Grief Became a Commodity

In 1990, the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery in Santa Monica hosted Dmitri Baltermants’s first commercial exhibition. By most measures, it was a success. This chapter describes the transformation of his war photographs that portrayed deep human emotion into commodities on the marketplace. Since 1990, Baltermants’s work, especially Grief, has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic at art photography auctions and in exhibitions, often selling over the expected price and garnering much critical attention. In 1999, the Baltermants archive was sold to an American collector hoping to generate enough attention in the photographer to make back his investment. He failed to do so and sold it back to anonymous buyers in Moscow, who ended up incorporating Baltermants’s archive into a massive photo fund. The fund went belly up eighteen months after its founding, and the location of his archive remains a mystery.

The Aftermath of GRIEF

This chapter is engaged with photography’s fundamental challenge: it is both documentary evidence, in which the camera is a tool of a technician, and a work of art, in which the click of the shutter is but one step on the road to creating an art photograph. It opens with Baltermants’s soaring career with Izvestiia until June 1942, when he was fired for mislabeling a photograph of a blown-up tank and was sent to a penal battalion that fought at Stalingrad. The experience nearly cost him his life. After the victory by the Allies, photographs were used as evidence in war crimes trials, including Baltermants’s. At the end of the war, he returned to photographic preeminence. After Stalin’s death, he became a leading documenter of global Soviet power under Nikita Khrushchev. He took pictures in Vietnam, India, and China, and his work appeared in domestic and international art exhibitions.

The Making of a Soviet War Photographer and the German Occupation of Kerch

This chapter introduces the reader to Dmitri Baltermants, beginning with his birth to a Warsaw-based Jewish family and then describing his development as a Soviet photographer in the 1930s. A second-generation Soviet photographer and master of the horizontal, Baltermants was trained in socialist realist aesthetics, which documented and elevated the revolutionary experiment that was Stalin’s Soviet Union. In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Baltermants’s world turned upside down. The second half of the chapter focuses on the German invasion and its rapid advance through Soviet territory until its occupation of Kerch in November. The chapter walks the reader through the unfolding process of Kerch under German occupation. In a matter of two weeks, German authorities rounded up the entire population of Jews, drove them to an antitank trench in nearby Bagerovo, and then murdered them in a Holocaust by bullets. It concludes with Kerch’s liberation in late December.

Valuing Grief

This chapter traces Baltermants’s entry into the art photography market. In the mid-1960s, he had his first New York City exhibition alongside other well-known photojournalists, including Robert Doisneau and Irving Penn. From there his work was included in a Metropolitan Museum show, and he was often the lone Soviet representative in major photography shows. In the 1970s, Baltermants began giving Grief visual context by exhibiting other images taken that same wartime day in Kerch. In 1983, Baltermants had his first solo show in New York City, and although reviewers loved his wartime work, reviewers panned the overall show. The critical appreciation for his wartime work and disappointment at his postwar Soviet “propaganda” did not dampen a few intrepid collectors’ interest in bringing him to the Western art photograph market and adding financial value to the list of values his photography possessed.

Introduction

The introduction describes how the author first learned about Grief from a local photography collector, whom Shneer learned played a central role in exposing the Soviet photographer Dmitri Baltermants and the photograph to the global art market. The collector assumed that, given its aesthetics, the photograph was a postbattle image taken at Kerch. Only through painstaking research did Shneer learn that Grief was one of the first photographs documenting the liberation of a Nazi atrocity site, even though there are likely no Jews in the photograph, either dead or alive. It is found in Holocaust photo archives and major art museums’ permanent collections and has been exhibited around the world since the 1960s. This book is a biography of Grief and its maker and asks how a photograph documenting Nazi atrocities can be found in modern art museums and Holocaust institutions, whose missions seem diametrically opposed.

Producing and Displaying Grief

Under Khrushchev, Baltermants returned to his wartime archive and produced art photographs for exhibition of some of his best work that he had taken during the war for publications. This chapter describes the process by which he produced Grief. This photograph, named for an emotion of the living, became a defining image of the Soviet experience of war. Given the horrors the photograph depicts, Baltermants hoped that it might also be used to position the Soviet Union as the global advocate for world peace. To that end, Baltermants curated his solo exhibitions, first in Moscow and then in London, in which he explored the tension between the commonalities of human experience and the differences in the wartime experience of the Soviet people. The chapter shows how in the 1960s, Baltermants made Grief both a powerful photograph and a useful weapon in Soviet cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.

Witnessing Grief: The First Reports of Genocide

This chapter takes up the question of bearing witness to atrocity in words and images. After it discovered mass atrocities on the outskirts of Kerch, the Red Army commissioned investigators to determine what took place. Shneer contrasts official Soviet reports with the German administration’s own memoranda to Berlin describing what took place at Kerch. The writer Ilya Selvinsky also came to report for the Soviet press, but he could only respond to German atrocities with poetry. Several photographers documented the Kerch mass atrocities, including Mark Redkin, Yevgeny Khaldei, and Dmitri Baltermants. The author introduces the reader to the concepts of voyeurism, necropornography, and Aby Warburg’s pathos formula as ways to interpret atrocity images. Finally, this chapter describes the publication and circulation of atrocity photographs from Kerch to Moscow and from Moscow around the world.