Photography Without Borders

Dmitri Baltermants was a Polish man who taught himself photography while working part-time. His reportage of WWII was largely censored by his Soviet employers – presumably because his photography presented the side of war that leaders would rather their people did not know about. Rather than portray the supposed glory of war, he sought to represent the suffering of battle – the soldiers’ ignoble end, the suffering of survival and widowhood. His most famous image, Grief, shows women of the village of Kerch searching for the bodies of their loved ones after a massacre.

Dmitri Baltermants