Collectors set their sights on snapshots of the Soviet era
Over the past 70 years, the Russian sports photographer Lev Borodulin, now 96, has amassed what is probably the largest privately owned collection of Soviet photography in the world. Around 60 of his near 10,000 prints have been unveiled in London for the first time, at Atlas Gallery, where pictures dating from a 1924 portrait of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian futurist poet, by Alexander Rodchenko, to a 1961 shot of the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin by Igor Snegirev, are for sale.
The collection began shortly after the end of the Second World War, when Borodulin, then in his twenties and serving in the army, was asked to create a photographic chronicle of battles fought by his regiment. What began as a part-time task became a passion, as Borodulin sought to conserve evidence of Soviet photographers’ prodigious cultural output.
By befriending notable military photojournalists such as Max Alpert (1899-1980), whose Kombat, 1942, is in the London exhibition (priced at £6,000), and by working as a photographer and picture editor at
Ogoniok, the Russian version of Life magazine, where Borodulin met numerous other photographers, he assembled an impressive collection.
Among the first he acquired was by Yevgeny Khaldey (1917-1997), who worked for the official news agency, TASS. One of Khaldey’s most celebrated images depicts the raising of a Soviet banner of victory on the Reichstag building in 1945. Khaldey staged the photograph, using a tablecloth with the hammer and sickle sewn on by a Berlin tailor. The example at Atlas Gallery is an original large print made for exhibition purposes and is priced at £15,000.
Borodulin was never in it for the money. When he was collecting, the prints had no commercial value; he simply wanted to preserve what he admired for posterity. When an agency like TASS was clearing out, he would do the clearing. In this way, says Maya Katznelson, the collection curator, he rescued invaluable works, also obtaining prints from the archives of magazines such as Soviet Photo, Ogoniok, Iskusstvo and Theatrical Life.
In addition, numerous works came from the families of photographers and from Russian art critics such as Lily Ukhtomskaya, the editor of Soviet Photo magazine, which suffered a disastrous fire before it was closed down in 1991 – Borodulin salvaged what he could.
In 1972, because of growing antisemitism in Russia, the Jewish Borodulin left to live in Tel Aviv, returning to his homeland from time to time if he heard of an archive of photographs being discarded.
Over the past 20 years, his son, Aleksandr, has helped to organise the collection and lend prints to museums. All the while, Soviet photography has slowly been accruing some value. Iconic and rare vintage prints by the best-known photographers, such as Rodchenko or El Lissitzky, can now fetch six-figure sums.
Last year, Borodulin invited the London photography dealer Ben Burdett, of Atlas Gallery, to represent the collection. When Burdett went to Moscow, where much of Borudulin’s collection was in storage, he found a garage stacked high with treasures.
As ever in photography, vintage prints (printed near the time the photographs were taken), command top prices – an image of a child listening to a radio in 1929 by Rodchenko, for instance, is £22,000.
However, a 1941 photograph of children on a collective farm by the lesser-known Mikhail Grachev (1913-2003) is priced at only £2,400. Also under £4,000 are Fifties prints of divers and gymnasts by Borodulin.
Other classic images taken in the Twenties and Thirties but printed later, in the Fifties and Sixties, are at the more affordable end of the scale. They’re very unlikely to be reprinted, says Burdett, because no one knows where the negatives are – Borodulin never thought to rescue them.
Two days after opening, a quarter of the exhibition had already sold. First in the queue, says Burdett, have been Russian buyers, but the images also clearly strike a chord with those who want to experience the printed image rather than a reproduction on the internet. The show runs until Nov 24.