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"Night Witches," taken in Novorossiisk, 1943. The women are pilots who flew night missions. Khaldei liked to photograph soldiers in rare moments of leisure and peace.Click here to view more photos from the Khaldei Collection.
Yevgeny Khaldei, 1917-1997, captured half a century of striking images of Soviet history. One of the most famous photographers of World War II, he covered that conflict from its opening hours in the far north through to the taking of Berlin and eventually the Nuremberg Trials.
In 1948 he lost his job, either because of the post-war frenzy of antisemitism which began in that year and continued until Stalin's death, or because he was an admirer of Tito, who had broken with Stalin: either would have sufficed. He slipped into obscurity.
For years, his photographs were reproduced in Russia and in the west without his name on them. In 1995, 50 years after the war's end, he began to be exhibited again in Europe and the United States.
His first U.S. exhibition was at Colgate, though he went on to have exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere.
Mr. Khaldei worked together with Colgate professors Alice and Alexander Nakhimovsky on a retrospective of his work, Witness to History: The Photographs of Yevgeny Khaldei (Aperture, 1997). He died just before the publication of that book and before the completion of a film about his life and work
Mr. Khaldei was very taken with the Colgate students he met on his two visits here. Some of the generous collection of photographs he gave to us are on display outside the Russian department in Lawrence Hall; most are in the Picker Art Gallery.
Khaldei was the Soviet photographer at the Nuremberg Trials, 1945, when he shot this image of the city in the aftermath of war. Click here to read a Colgate Scene article about Khaldei's visit to Colgate.