Yevgeny Khaldei
| Yevgeny Khaldei | |
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Khaldei in 1946
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| Born | 23 March [O.S. 10 March] 1917 Yuzovka (now Donetsk, Ukraine), Russian Empire |
| Died | 6 October 1997 (aged 80) Moscow, Russia |
| Occupation | Photojournalism |
| Children | Anna Khaldei, Leonid Khaldei |
Yevgeny Anan'evich Khaldei (23 March [O.S. 10 March] 1917 – 6 October 1997) was a Red Army photographer, best known for his World War II photograph of a Soviet soldier Raising a flag over the Reichstag, in Berlin, capital of the vanquished Nazi Germany.
Khaldei was born to a Jewish family in Yuzovka (now Donetsk, Ukraine) and was obsessed with photography since childhood, having built his first childhood camera with his grandmother's eyeglasses. He started working with the Soviet press agency TASS at the age of nineteen as a photographer. His father and three of his four sisters were murdered by the Nazis during the war.
In 1945 he persuaded his uncle to create a large Soviet flag after seeing Joe Rosenthal's photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima while the Soviet army closed in on Berlin and took it with him to Berlin for the Reichstag shot.
He later took photographs of the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials and of the Red Army during its offensive in Japanese Manchuria.
Khaldei continued to work in photojournalism after the war as a TASS staff photographer, but was reprimanded in a 1947 evaluation:
In October 1948, Khaldei received notice that he was being let go because of the agency's "staff downsizing." Khaldei himself attributed the firing to anti-Semitism.
Khaldei continued to photograph, now working as a freelance photographer for Soviet newspapers, and focused on capturing the scenes of everyday life. In 1959, he got a job again at the newspaper Pravda, where he worked until he was forced to retire in 1970.
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