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The Roads of War

A photo exhibition “The Roads of War” by a war press photographer Anatoly Arkhipov will be opened on February, 17, in the Excursion-Exhibition Centre “People’s House”.

What can be more truthful and expressive than memories of war by a man, who got through it? What can convey pain and fear, love and hatred, despair and hope brighter than the pictures taken with his camera? Together with the front press photographer Anatoly Arkhipov we shall go by a long road of fierce battles, which led our people to the Victory, we shall live through the events of those terrible years again and remember what price was paid to recover freedom to our Motherland.

The name of Anatoly Arkhipov was forgotten. Many of his photos were published and replicated authorless or ascribed to other photographers. But thanks to the press photographer’s son, the big family archives of negatives have been preserved, and the exhibition will display a part of them telling about the war time.

Anatoly Arkhipov went through the whole war, and in 1945, he took pictures of defeated Berlin. Not only a witness of the war, had he taken part in it on a par with ordinary soldiers, not with a gun, but with a “leika” and a notebook. He isn’t an aloof observer in his pictures. He makes feel blood and fumes of war, its pain and bitterness.

The pictures of war are also pages of the photo journalist’s biography. They can tell where, when, what front and what battle the photographer attended or joined. As well as many of war press photographers, he had to solve the most complicated problems: not only to shoot a picture, but also to develop the film in the field and to send it to the newspaper.

The pictures shown at the exhibition are different: we can see soldiers in the battlefield and at rest, in reconnaissance and on a halt, in a combat patrol and on the march. A land covered by fire, pitted with craters of mines and shells, cities turned into ruins. At a moment of respite the soldiers are watching an amateur concert. The scenes of the last days of the war: the streets of defeated Berlin, steaming boxes of broken buildings, the columns of Reichstag riddled with bullets.

Most of the photographs by Anatoly Arkhipov are exhibited for a wide public for the first time.

You are welcome to the exhibition, which will run until June, 26, 2015.

Nina Noskina