POWs, Stalingrad

Dmitri Baltermants

1942 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

As a correspondent for the Soviet government newspaper Izvestiya during World War II, Baltermants often manipulated his photographs to enhance their emotional impact. Here, a line of German prisoners of war snakes across barren fields in a forced march to a Soviet detainment camp. More than 91,000 German soldiers were captured in the Battle of Stalingrad, which raged from July 1942 to February 1943. Careful examination of the photograph, however, reveals that Baltermants seamlessly combined two separate exposures of the same group of soldiers, effectively doubling the number of prisoners—an exaggeration that viscerally conveys the magnitude of Russia’s pivotal triumph over Nazi Germany.

Artist

Dmitri Baltermants

Date

1942

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2011