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Military photographer Yevgeny Khaldei was born in Yuzovka (now Donetsk, Ukraine). He lost his mother and grandfather during a Jewish pogrom on March 13, 1918, when a bullet passed through his side and into his mother, killing her. He studied in a heder. Khaldei discovered his passion for photography while working in a factory. And at 13 he took his first photo with a self-made camera. By the age of eighteen (1939), Khaldei was working as a staff photographer at the TASS News Agency in Moscow. He took photos of Dneprostroy and Alexey Stakhanov. He represented the TASS on the naval front during the Great Patriotic War. Khaldei covered all 1,481 days of the war between Russia and Germany as a correspondent for the Tass News Agency. Many of his photographs were published at the time, but they have now been compiled into From Murmansk to Berlin, a chronicle of the Russian involvement in the War. He took pictures of Paris meeting of foreign ministers, the defeat of the Japanese in the Far East, a conference of heads of the Allied Powers in Potsdam, and the signing of the surrender document of Germany. Khaldei was also a witness to several pivotal moments in history and is particularly reputed for his photographs during the Nuremberg Trials. He had his hand in liberation of Sevastopol, in taking Novorossiysk by storm, Kerch, in liberation of Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Hungary. Khaldei worked with the TASS until 1949, when he was fired due to the growing cosmopolitanism. Then he worked as a private freelance photographer, focusing on the scenes from everyday life, and after the war he created a unique gallery of soldiers' images in peace-time work. After Stalin’s death he got a job again at the newspaper. In 1995, on the Perpignan International Festival of Photojournalism (France), Yevgeny Khaldei was awarded the most honorable award in the art world — the title of the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. In 1997, The Witness of History. Photos by Yevgeny Khaldei book was published by the American Aperture. Also in May 1997, the 60-minute film, Yevgeny Khaldei — A Photographer of the Stalin era, opened.
In 2004, Editions Du Chene — Hachette Livre, PH (France) has published the book of Mark Grosse, Khaldei. Photographer of the Soviet Union (Khaldei. Un Photoreporter en Union Sovietique).
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