Physical Description
Black and white gelatin silver photographic print, portrait orientation, depicting 5 female farm workers walking through a field with a baby. Four women are grouped in the foreground around a central woman smiling up at a naked, male infant she holds above her head. The others are positioned slightly behind and around her. They wear cloth tops, skirts, and headscarves and 2 wear long aprons; 3 women are barefoot and 2 wear stockings and shoes. The women on the right and behind the central figure carry pitchforks over their shoulders and the woman left of center holds a rake. A haystack and part of an open wagon are in the left middle ground. Behind the women on the right is a partly visible steam powered tractor billowing smoke from the smokestack. The women in this choreographed scene walk directly towards the photographer. They occupy the bottom half of the frame; the top reveals a sky with wispy clouds.
Dimensions
overall: Height: 13.880 inches (35.255 cm) | Width: 11.000 inches (27.94 cm)
Materials
overall : gelatin silver print
Signature
back, top, Russian script, pencil : M. Markov-Grinberg
Inscription
back, top, Russian script, pencil : 1935 [symbol] / [Russian script]
back, bottom, right, pencil : DS 2200
Contributor
Artist:
Mark Markov-Grinberg
Subject:
Mark Markov-Grinberg
Biography
Mark Borisovich Markov-Grinberg was born on November 27, 1907, in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. He learned photography at secondary school. In 1925, he took his first job as a photographer for the Sovetsky Yug (Soviet South) newspaper and worked as a freelance correspondent for Ogonyok magazine. In 1926, Markov-Grinberg moved to Moscow and worked for various trade union newspapers and the magazine, Krasnoarmeyskaya Smena (Transformation). In 1930, he accepted an offer to work for the Fotokhronika TASS (Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union). He traveled around the country photographing the official Soviet Union: major construction projects, collective farms, and happy workers engaged in building Soviet Society, as well as prominent Russian and foreign personalities. His photographs appeared in major Soviet publications, including USSR in Construction, a magazine that documented Stalin’s Five-Year Plans to industrialize the Soviet Union. In 1934, TASS commissioned Markov-Grinberg to create a photo essay detailing a day in the life of Ukrainian miner, Nikita Izotov. He created an iconic portrait of Izotov as a Socialist worker hero. The Izotov photo essay launched Markov-Grinberg's career as a Stalin-era photographer and he became one of the most important photographers of his generation. His work was part of the socialist realist movement in photography which pictured life as it should be in idealized images made to look like objective recordings of things as they were.
During the Soviet-Finnish War (1939-1940), Markov-Grinberg worked for TASS as a war correspondent and documented the fighting on the Karelian Isthmus. In September 1941, he was drafted into the Red Army, and continued to take photographs. He became the army correspondent for the military publication, Slovo Boitsa (Soldier’s World), in July 1943. He created well-known images of the Battle of Kursk and the crematorium at Stutthof concentration camp, when it was liberated on May 9, 1945, by the Soviet Army.
Markov-Grinberg lost his job with TASS in 1948 as a result of the anti-Semitic climate of late Stalinism. After his demobilization in 1953, he worked as a photographer for the Red Army Illustrated Gazette and, later, for the photography publishing office of the Soviet Union Agricultural Exhibition, a theme park about the People’s Economy. From 1957–1973, Markov-Grinberg worked for the Club and Art Hobby magazine. He took part in photography exhibitions in the USSR and abroad. An honorary member of the Russian Union of Art Photographers, Markov-Grinberg died in 2006 at the age of 99.
