Leaving a Son to the Partisans, Leningrad

Mikhail Trakhman

1942

Photograph of mother kissing her son, who has a gun and a backpack, in foreground, while another soldier waits in the background on his horse holding the reins of another horse.
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Creator Bio

Mikhail Trakhman

1918–1976

Moscow-born Mikhail Trakhman was a Soviet photojournalist who documented World War II as a photo correspondent for the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. In the 1930s, Trakhman studied photography under Arkady Shaikhet, a prominent Soviet photojournalist, and took courses in cinematography. Despite his Jewish background, Trakhman’s photographs served more to advance Soviet ideologies through glorification of the patriotism and heroism of war than to expose the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Related Guide

Visual and Material Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

1939–1973

Jewish visual art flourished and diversified in the postwar period, reflecting the social and political transformations taking place in the world.

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