Война не по уставу. Редкие негативы Второй Мировой войны фотографа Валерия Фаминского

There were no signs of valery Faminsky anywhere

neither here nor there. He was trying to reach out...

He even wrote to Stalin.

Generally, mission of photography is to...

Ask questions, not give answers.

Here you can see ruins and a bandaged horse.

Soviet style of war photography was, first of all, created by state censorship

As far as I know there was not a single published picture

of a wounded soldier of Red Army.

My name is Arthur Bondar

I'm a photographer and

my primary occupation is photography.

But we're here because of my my second occupation,

My hobby, you can say.

I explore photo negatives of Second World War

unknown negatives. I search for them.

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Valery Faminsky. War not according to the charter

It all started when I moved from Kiev to Moscow in 2012

I was finishing my projects about Chernobyl, about war veterans and

after my book about Chernobyl was sold out I had some money to invest into my next project.

Accidently I came across an ad

It was for sale of frontline photo negatives, WWII negatives

It was negatives, not prints. Prints are easy to come by. They were made by soldiers

or for exhibitions. It's often easy to find them.

I'm not very interested in prints. But negatives are an original source, and its almost impossible to find 'em

after 78 years.

At first I wondered if it's even possible to store negatives for this long and how come there are still unknown ones

I thought all of historical materials (especially photo negatives) are already in the museums

and are studied by museum workers and historians.

But you can see that to this day there are still a lot of unstudied and unknown materials.

When I saw this ad I thought everyone would wanna buy this negatives, I called, and surprisingly I was first in line.

Seller told me that many museums were interested, but

they either don't have enough money, or they couldn't process the deal for bureaucratic reasons.

So I bought them.

Turned out this photo negatives were work of Valery Faminsky.

Back then nobody knew who he was

Before meeting sellers I tryied to google his name, who he was

and there were no results.

Today if type in his name there will be hundreds of links and mentions.

I made a deal with sellers. When I first studied those photo negatives

as a person who works a lot with war photography (I've seen a lot of historical war photos)

I realised that this is something I've never seen before.

Not in exhibitions, not in catalogs or books

And especially not in history books

Some negatives were really hard to percept

They are not showing the glorious side of war, not something we used to see every Victory day

All of the negatives are archived this way. This is how it looks

Archive consists of two huge parts:

Crimea in 1944, May and April

and Berlin, Germany in 1945 during April and May

end of the War.

All of the negatives were stored very well, very meaningful

And this also got me interested. It was classic soviet way of archivation.

You have negative itself...

This is how it looks

This is a paper that covered a negative with captions

and small contact sheets.

Contact sheet which showed how a photograph would look like.

This all belonged to photographer Valery Faminsky.

Some of his pictures reveal interesting facts about war.

For example, here you can see dog sleds.

It's not commonly known that during WWII, Great Patriotic War dogs were used it evacuate wounded soldiers from front lines.

According to calculations more than 650 000 dogs were used for this purpose.

I saw some unknown facts, unknown photos, negatives.

I work a lot with negatives. I shoot film as a photographer, so it was easy for me to evaluate what I saw.

I went to Perpignan photo festival. This is a big international photo festival.

Photographers and photo editors from all around the world go there.

Thats were I met James Estrin, a photo editor for New York Times.

He saw the negatives and told me that they are really great and we should publish them.

We agreed on first publication in NY Times, but before that

but before that he offered to send all of the photos for verification to war photography institution in Houston.

We were hoping to find any other trace of Valery Faminsky in history.

When Houston institution recieved and studied all of the negatives, experts concluded that Faminsky's level of photographic skill is very high.

It's as good as Robert Capa

Experts picked photo negatives that should be included in war photography history, by their opinion.

Houston reached out to experts from Russia

to find more info about Valery Faminsky. But Russians had no idea.

No signs of him anywhere.

We had our first publication in NY Times in November, then in December we published Faminsky photos in Bird in Flight.

It is a photographic website. And it was a sensation. Those photos spread everywhere.

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In January I got a call from a woman. She turned out to be Faminsky granddaughter.

She was the one who originaly found the archive.

She told us a lot about her grandfather.

And she also told us that her grandfather always dreamed of publishing his own book.

But he died in 1993 in Moscow before he could do that.

Before the War Valery Faminsky worked at Aviakhim plant

At first he was photographic assistant, than he became a head of photographic laboratory.

When the war started he really wanted to go to the frontline as a war photographer, photojournalist.

But he had one big problem: he wore glasses. Official response was "We don't need a blind photographer on the frontlines".

Faminsky tried to reach out anywhere. He even wrote to Stalin.

Only in the end of 1943 he could join the war as a war photographer.

He joined photojournalists sent by War Medical Museum at the front lines. They were sent to collect materials about military medical aid.

Those photos purpose for to study military medical aid and other ways to help wounded soviet soldiers.

After the war Valery Faminsky went to expeditions. He even had one personal exhibition. But most of the time he worked as a retouch artist.

You can say that he has not been an active photographer anymore.

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You can't say that he's absolutely unnoticed photographer.

You couldn't work as a photo correspondent at the front lines without state accreditation.

He had one.

So his photos must be stored in state archives, but it's almost impossible to find anything in our archives, some document disappear completely.

Even in War Medical Museum (institution which exists to this day) you can not find a single Faminsky photo.

Which is odd, considering the fact that he gave out all of his negatives to the museum. Where are they? I don't know.

One of my favorite Faminsky photos is this picture.

It's the scene of soldiers unloading the wounded at the first-aid post on Friedrichstraße

30th of April 1945.

You can tell that Valery Faminsky had a lot of experience in working with an image and in photography generally.

He understood what to include and exclude from frame.

Those carriages to the left and to the right,

wounded man, who is being unloaded on a blanket. Blacket is dirty.

Image gives you a perspective of the street, and that attracts you into a photo.

Generally, mission of photography is to ask questions, not give answers.

This image gives us a lot of questions. You can spend a lot of time exploring it. There are so many different details.

Starting from destroyed houses, to writings on the walls and shopwindows.

One of the reasons why I work with this negatives is that

when I manage to get them published (in web, newspapers or magazines)

these photos start a new life.

For example, after the publication of this image young man wrote me that this is his grandfather.

He has death certificate, but doesn't know where his grandfather is buried.

But he knows that his grandfather was badly wounded in his left forearm.

As you can see at this picture.

At 30th of April he was transfered to first-aid post on Friedrichstraße

He died during surgery

We don't know where he is buried.

Many people recognized grandparents or even great-grandfathers in these photos.

Probably, it's the main goal of working with those archives.

Ofcourse, when you see this stories of people finding their relatives

you start to understand that it's not all for nothing.

Another one of my favorite Faminsky negatives

which is not about actual fighting at war.

This picture does not depict war, except for remnants of buildings, ruins and a wounded horse

One of the most cruel things at war is exploitation of animals.

Faminsky captured a lot of killed animals (especially horses) on his Crimean photos.

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it is believed in Russia and in the West that the war created a powerful style of Soviet war photography

I'm not sure that it's war's doing, but I'm sure that this huge image of soviet photography, so called soviet style of photography was, first of all created by censorship.

A lot of photos from my collection, which were not printed in soviet era. Those pictures were just stored.

Those pictures show that every photographer has his own unique style. Censorship made everything look alike.

Any negative went through a military censorship

The photographer took pictures at the front, after that he transferred them to the military censorship

Censors did their job. Photos chosen by them went to newspapers.

The remaining photos were sent to museums. War Medical Museum in case of Faminsky.

The most terrible thing is that war censorship destroyed photos that did not meet censorship standards.

That's really terrible, because they didn't even care to store this materials. They just destroyed it.

Negatives that were accepted were moved to newspapers.

And after that editors also picked what to print and what not to print.

Often a lot of photos were saved for the future.

Saved what for? A photo collector told when I was purchasing one of his archives that those unpublished photos were used to create collages.