Valery Faminsky. May the 45th. Berlin

On April 15, 2017, the Gallery of Classical Photography opens an exhibition of rare military photographs of Valery Faminsky, dedicated to Victory Day. The sensational story of the archive of the photographer, found by Arthur Bondar on the site of private announcements, and successfully passed through the pages of the entire world press, will now be presented in Moscow.

During his service as a war reporter, the photographer visited seven fronts of World War II. He participated in the liberation of Sevastopol and the entry of Soviet troops into Berlin. His photographic look is distinguished by a keen interest in the fates of ordinary people drawn into the crucible of war. His camera is primarily biased - the results of the largest military conflict in the history of mankind cannot leave indifferent a person who thinks and sees. Queues for bread and loading of the wounded, children staring at the camera and broken military equipment - the author is not interested in documentation, but rather in the symbolic order of the real and the fictional, the moment when a particular case forms a story. These photographs of Faminsky are interesting, who escaped the sieves of state propaganda and retained the details of large events of eyewitness accounts.

Valery Faminsky was born in 1914 in Moscow. He took up photography in 1928, and since 1932 he has already worked as a dark lab assistant, after that - as head of the darkroom. In 1979, the Union of Artists of the USSR organized a solo exhibition of Faminsky’s works entitled “50 years with a camera on military and peaceful roads.”

After the death of the photographer, his heirs decided to sell the photo archive, carefully kept in the family for decades. By a lucky coincidence, these rare front-line photographs were bought by the famous photographer Arthur Bondar, thanks to whom this unique exhibition became possible. “At first glance at the negatives, I realized that I was holding in my hands a huge amount of historical material, mostly unknown to ordinary people, even citizens of the former USSR. During World War II, we had so much propaganda, but Faminski’s look was reflected here, sincerely interested in people on both sides of the barricades during World War II. ”

The exhibition will be held in the Small Hall of the Gallery of Classical Photography and includes about fifty photographs from the shooting of Berlin at the end of the war.