military tank with eyes on it at museum yellow

“How is it possible,” he thought, “that a bunch of Jews, who are supposed to be oppressed by the Soviet Union, are the ones charged with photographing the war?”Īs delicately as he could, Shneer put the question to one of the curators, who in typical Moscow style had a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. About four out of five of them, Shneer noticed, were Jewish surnames. Not only had they been taken with incredible skill-arranging light and form in a way that would put to shame many of today’s war photographers-but they were from the Soviet battlefields of World War II, which made the surnames of their authors seem all the more strange. To get inside, Shneer found that he had to ring a doorbell at a nondescript building, at which point a raspy voice came over the intercom and demanded: “Who are you? What do you want?” But the images inside astounded him.

At the time, displaying photography on gallery walls was still a fairly novel concept for Russia, and the exhibit was not meant to be a blockbuster. In 2003, a young American historian named David Shneer was conducting research in Moscow when he heard about an exhibition of photographs called Women at War.

Military tank with eyes on it at museum yellow