Baltermants, Dmitri.

Silver Print (184 x 287mm.), signed and titled by the photographer in pencil on the reverse, ruled for reproduction

Gift of the photographer to Colin Osman. Acquired from Osman's collection by the present owner.

D. Baltermants, ‘Dmitriy Baltermants: photographs from World War II’, Creative Camera, March 1975, pp. 82-87, this print reproduced pp. 86-7. 
T.H. Von Laue & A. Von Laue, Faces of a Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991; Photographs by Dmitri Baltermants (Golden, Colorado, Fulcrum, 1996), another print of this image (in a variant crop and entitled 'On the Road to War, Smolensk Front, 1941') illustrated p. 46.

Dmitri Baltermants, one of the leading Russian photographers of the twentieth century, is best known for his photographs of the so-called 'Great Patriotic War' of 1941-1945. Works such as 'Attack!' (1941), 'Grief' (1942) and 'Forging the Oder' (1944) are now celebrated as iconic images of combat and conflict. After the war, Baltermants worked for more than forty years as a photojournalist for the magazine Ogonyok, eventually becoming the head of its photo department. As elucidated in the autobiographical essay published by Colin Osman in Creative Camera in 1975, Baltermants did not see so-called 'documentary' photography as 'anti-artistic'; for him it was 'charged with tremendous philosophical and psychological impact' (p. 83). 

This photograph, like many of those taken by Baltermants and other war correspondents showing death, destruction or grief, was censored by the Soviet government.