- Art: painting invented the USSR
The Cold War had just begun. Photographer Robert Capa landed in Leningrad with his equipment divided into 10 suitcases. In World War II, he had coined a phrase: "If your photos aren't good enough, you haven't gotten close enough." The smoke from the artillery had dispersed and it was time to put the head inside the new enemy of the United States. Capa, with his Contax and Rolleiflex cameras, arrived in the USSR together with the writer John Steinbeck. They were the first special envoys from the United States to enter the country since the end of the war.
The exhibition How they see us. A Russian Portrait of Magnum is organized by the Manege museum in cooperation with the popular agency. It covers the period from 1947 to 2020 , and provides an insight into the USSR and Russia through the work of legendary photographers such as Robert Capa and others who followed him down the unknown Soviet path: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eve Arnold, Thomas Dworzak, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Bruno Barbey and others. In total, 250 works by 39 photographers. Images taken from the time the agency was founded to the present day. Normally Magnum releases samples already on display for traveling exhibitions, but in this case the Manezh Museum took the initiative to compile a completely new cultural project from the agency's archives. The result - coordinated by the historian Nina Gomiashvili- is a look at the country from outside , a collective portrait of the Soviet Union and Russia, two realities that fascinated foreign photographers. The exhibition lasted less than expected due to the coronavirus pandemic, but the museum has prepared a virtual tour to admire these works from home.
In 1947 Capa and Steinbeck visited and the cities of Moscow, Stalingrad and Kiev to see how people lived in the Soviet Union, a country closed to the outside of which they knew little beyond the growing tensions with the United States. The trip had been approved by the Soviet regime, who thought that showing the quiet everyday life of its citizens could help defuse tension.
At almost all times they were accompanied by an official who decided the itinerary. Perhaps the only exception is the selfie that Capa took of both of them in front of the mirror of a Soviet hotel in September 1947.
By drawing back the curtains of life in the USSR, Capa found not a hell but a sore land populated by very resistant beings that had survived the Nazi invasion, to continue with their life under the suffocating dictatorship of Stalin, feared and revered in parts equal . The dark and endless queue of Russians in Red Square before a Lenin and Stalin banner is portrayed by Capa under an unusual cloudless sky. German photographer Thomas Hepker would return to the same place in 1965 to find similar grim faces staring into the future with just the right dose of hope.
THE FIRST TRIP
Capa and Steinbeck's adventure was a journey into the unknown. The writer got the visa easily, but had to insist that the Soviet embassy issue another one for his stateless photographer.
-We have many photographers in the USSR.
-But they don't have a Cloak. If we do it, we do it together, in collaboration.
His book, Diario de Russia (republished in Spanish in 2012 by the publishing house Captain Swing) was published in 1948 but would not be translated into Russian until 1989.
Among those inspired by Capa was his brother Cornell, who after serving in the war worked developing negatives until he became a Life photographer in the UK, Latin America ... and also the USSR. When Robert died in 1956, Cornell took his place at Magnum, which was by then one of the most famous agencies in the world. It had been founded on May 22, 1947 and the name came from a bottle of champagne of the same name that was drank that night, when it was founded by five friends, photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Roger, David Seymour and William Vandivert. They wanted to break free from the pressure and dictates of the magazine press and create truly independent reporting.
In the USSR Cornell Capa followed in his brother's footsteps. In 1958, after Stalin died, he photographed the daily life of the Bolshoi Ballet School rehearsals and also legends of literature such as Boris Pasternak making a toast at his dacha in Peredelkino.
Portraits of the dancer Maya Plisetskaya , the film director Andrei Tarkovsky or the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny also appear in the exhibition . The Austrian photographer Inge Morat - who was previously an assistant to Henri Cartier-Bresson - studied the Russian language in depth before arriving in the USSR. Together with her husband, Arthur Miller, she published a book entitled In Russia , in which they reflected their impressions of Russian culture and its intellectuals. Andrei Dostoevsky, the writer's grandson, appears strolling through Leningrad streets in 1967 with the same frown as Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment . Another image of the sample difficult to forget.
"You just have to worry about your surroundings, take care of humanity and human comedy ," Elliott Erwitt, who was a friend of Robert Capa, once said. His is the intriguing photo of a couple at the civil registry in Bratsk (Siberia), in 1967, contemplating with serious concern the half smile of a guest.
Also noteworthy is the work of British photographer Peter Marlowe, who came to the USSR on a tourist visa in 1977 and did a series on Soviet dissidents. The exhibition thus rescues faces such as that of Vladimir Slepak, a radio engineer and fighter for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate . In that year, attempts to decimate his organization began: its members were subjected to KGB pressure and arrests. Norwegian Jonas Bendiksen, in his search for isolated communities, finds, amid the snow, a line of followers of Vissarion , a Russian mystic and religious leader, who claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus. The photo, taken in 2015, has the double timelessness offered by snowy landscapes and religious clothing.
The historical walk ends with photographs of the doctors and patients of Moscow Hospital 52. They are the work of Nanna Heitmann , who spent several days closely following the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic. Almost three-quarters of a century separate the first photo from the last. But journalism is the same, and so are its threats. Steinbeck told Capa before taking off: "Now the most dangerous trend in the world is the desire to believe a rumor rather than verify a fact."
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