Semyon Friedland - Photographs.

Semyon Osipovich Friedland (1905–1964), also transliterated as Fridlyand, was a Soviet photographer and photojournalist born in Kyiv, then part of the Russian Empire. He moved to Moscow in 1925 and began working in the photographic laboratory of the illustrated magazine Ogonyok, initially as an assistant before becoming a photographer. His cousin Mikhail Koltsov was an influential Soviet journalist closely associated with the magazine. By 1926 Friedland's photographs were appearing in Ogonyok, and during the following decade he became established within Soviet illustrated journalism. He worked for the Union photographic agency, later Soyuzfoto, as a photographer, editor and departmental head, studied cinematography at the State Institute of Cinematography, and contributed to USSR in Construction and Pravda. His photographs also appeared in important photographic publications including Sovetskoe Foto and Novyi Lef. Friedland participated in the major Ten Years of Soviet Photography exhibition in 1928 and the international Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929. His work developed within the rapidly expanding Soviet illustrated press, where individual photographs were increasingly combined into sequences with captions and graphic design to construct extended photographic reports.

During the Second World War Friedland worked as a photographic correspondent for the Soviet Information Bureau, photographing the Eastern Front, including the Battle of Stalingrad and the Soviet recapture of territory in the Caucasus. After the war he returned to Ogonyok and during the 1950s became head of its photography department. His post-war assignments extended across the Soviet Union and recorded factories, agriculture, reconstruction, cities, villages, workers, families and everyday public life. He also worked increasingly with colour photography, which became an important component of Ogonyok during the post-war period. Friedland's position as both photographer and photographic editor gave him considerable influence over the presentation of Soviet photojournalism and the development of younger photographers working for the magazine. He died in Moscow on 14 February 1964. More than 19,000 photographs attributed to Friedland survive in Russian collections, while another substantial archive is preserved by the University of Denver, providing a photographic record extending from the experimental Soviet photography of the 1920s and 1930s through the Second World War and into the post-war Soviet Union.

Camera is on:
Thank you for all your support.

Photographs by Semyon Friedland (1905–1964).
Source: Wikimedia Commons and contributing archive collections.
Licence: Public Domain where indicated on individual image records.

#ww2 #russia #photography #sovietunion #photojournalism #ussr #easternfront #stalingrad #worldwartwo #sovietlife #soviet #russian #1930s #1940s #1950s #historyofphotography