Great grandpa

Mark Mark Markov-Grinberg November 7, 1907, Rostov-on-Don – November 1, 2006, New York was a Soviet photographer and photo artist.

A view of the Kremlin from the 14th floor of the New York Hotel. 1930

In 1925 he became a photo correspondent for the Rostov newspaper Sovetsky Yug and a freelance correspondent for Ogonyok magazine. Moved to New York in 1926. Working as a photographer for trade union magazines, shooting for Smena magazine.

In 1938, he was invited to the TASS agency. The photos were published in the “USSR at the Construction site” magazine.

Since the first days of the Great Patriotic War, he was a private at the front, and since 1943 he has been a photographer for the newspaper “Boyotov’s Word”. After the war he served with the rank of captain as a photo correspondent for the “Red Army Illustrated Newspaper.

In the 1950s he worked as a photographer for the All-Union Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy and in the magazine “Club and Amateur Art”.

Participated in many Soviet and foreign photo exhibitions.

Honorary Member of the American Union of Photographers.

Markov-Greenberg’s work has been shown in Australia, Germany, France, England, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Singapore, Hungary, Romania, Poland, and other countries.

Mark Markov-Greenberg did not live to see his centenary.

Natalya Markovna, daughter of the classic of Soviet photography, and I, leaving urgent matters behind, drink tea and recall.

– Why does your father have a double surname: Markov-Greenberg??

– When Mark Grinberg began working as a photo reporter for a city newspaper in Rostov-on-Don, the editor advised him to keep his last name a secret. Those were troubled times: the twenties, crime. His editor quickly thought up a pseudonym: “They call you Mark, you’ll be Markov. For a long time, after my father moved to New York, he published himself as “Mark Markov”. When the fight against cosmopolitanism in the late ’40s-early ’50s began, when Jewish photographers were fired from all editorial boards, he added his real name to his pseudonym, explaining his action in the following way: “Let everybody know who is who”.

– So it was a deliberate act and a quiet protest?

– It turns out.

– And what was he like, Mark Borisovich Markov-Greenberg?

– Unfortunately, I don’t know much about his work. He was away on business all the time. I know he was easy to get along with people, he was contactable and easy to talk to. Humble, devoted to his work and friends. No one was allowed to speak disapprovingly about his friends.

– He wasn’t trying to teach you photography?

– I tried, but nothing came out of it. When I was a kid he gave me a wide-film camera, I snapped a few shots, he developed and printed them, and then it just didn’t work out for me. There were no conditions. We Lived in a Municipal Apartment. Later, when we moved into our own apartment and he was given a studio in the same building, he somehow invited me to help him print his photos. But I did everything wrong: I held the tweezers the wrong way, I dipped the paper into the solution the wrong way, in short, everything was wrong! Mark Borisovich was not happy with them and I decided I would never be a photographer, so I entered the Pedagogical Institute after high school. I don’t generally like to take pictures and I didn’t like it when Grandfather took them.

Natalya Markovna pointed at her portrait hanging on the wall.

– This one was shot on color film. Grandfather had just begun to master it. I all turned out the tone of a red curtain, on the background of which stood. He converted them to b&w, it turned out better than in color. He’s not into color photography. Whether he didn’t like it or the conditions – I don’t know.

Natalya Markovna calls her father “Dad”, she puts in a different meaning, but it sounds like in American families: Dad – dad, daddy.

We recall Marc Grosse and our acquaintance with Natalia Markovna in Perpignan at the 2002 photo festival, where Marc organized Marc’s exhibition.

– Yes, and do you know what Mark Grosse shocked us with?? Grandfather didn’t let anyone near his negatives. And trusted him. Marc came to us, took out his white gloves and prepared to look at the negatives. Grandfather was blown away. He took out his scrapbooks which contained prewar negatives. The scrapbooks my mother took with her to Barnaul, during the evacuation. It’s the only piece from before the war that survived. What was left in New York was burned. It was cold, and we burned anything that could burn to keep warm.

– He had his first solo exhibition in France?

– No, the first was in Lithuania in 1985. But there was no personal exhibition in America. A retrospective exhibition at the Lumière Brothers Center that year.

I leaf through the album made for the opening of the exhibition. My favorite picture on the cover is “The Girl with the Oar”.

– You know, it’s very symbolic that the girl with the oar – sexy challenge to the Soviet era – is on the cover of Mark Borisovich’s retrospective album. Remember, I came to see you when he was 95 years old? When he and I got to this picture, he asked me, ‘Isn’t she sexy?”. I almost fell off my chair: “Mark Borisovich at the age of 95!”.

– Come on, that word is not at all out of his vocabulary..

– Well, he may have used the word “erotic.”.

– In fact, he warmed up to this photo in his last years: everyone printed it, everyone liked it. But he considered his “calling cards” to be the portrait of Nikita Izotov, a Stakhanovite from Gorlovka, and the photograph of the installation of the star on the Spasskaya Tower. He has a whole series about Izotov: he visited him in Gorlovka, took photos of him with his family and in his work. He liked Izotov himself. As a man.

– You know, Natalia Markovna, your father was very brave. His photographs show it. He was not afraid of unexpected composition of the frame, of abrupt cropping of subjects. Take this shot of the star on the Kremlin tower: look how bravely he cuts into the hand of the monument. He’s got a lot of innovative photos with the foreground, with details cut off, creating volume in the frame…

We look at the photos, Natalya Markovna adds:

– For the exhibition I managed to find previously unprinted footage.

– Before the war, he worked for the TASS Photo Chronicle, then he went off to war. What happened next?

– He had left for the front from the TASS Photo Chronicle, but after the war he was no longer invited there.

– How he survived the war?

– How about the rest of them?

– I think he was so fragile.

– Well, that’s what you imagined. You’ve seen him in his old age, he’s all bent over and smaller in stature. And he was a very athletic man. Played soccer, swam well. During the war he was in the army all the time, moving with the units.

Natalya Markovna takes out small sheets of paper scribbled in tiny handwriting…

– I found this in his papers. Maybe that’s the answer to how he was at the front.

She reads:

“For example, shooting heroes. At dawn – to the front line. Shooting in extreme conditions. Back to the editorial office by shuttle bus. Film developing and printing at night. And so daily. Fell asleep at the magnifier. All the footage related to the Great Patriotic War is very dear to me. Especially at the Kursk Bulge. Rejoiced about the success of my army and rejoiced about Evzerikhin’s arrival: a connection with the “Great Land”. I was glad of the time when I could get a good night’s sleep. I was deathly sleepy”.

And here’s more:

“The dearest was Victory Day. I used to catch myself that when I was rejoicing with my soldier friends I forgot about my reporting duties and let the FED rest more than it had to”.

We’re silent for a minute, experiencing an emotional greeting from the past. Then Natalia Markovna continues:

– At the end of ’52, my father was “asked” out of the “Illustrated Gazette”. Everyone was kicked out and cleaned up. My father was offered to either leave the army or go to the Far Eastern military district to live and work. He chose to quit. But after that he couldn’t settle down anywhere for a long time. My grandfather was friends with the Rodchenko family. Varvara Stepanova, Rodchenko’s wife, helped him get a job at VDNKh. By this time there were many who had been fired on the fifth point. Worked at the VDNKh photo publishing house until 1957. And then he got a job at the magazine “Artistic amateurism”. There were two magazines, Diament worked in “Club” and my father worked in “Amateur Art”, and then the two magazines were merged and it was called “Club and Amateur Art”. My father worked there from 1957 until 1973, when he retired. It was a merry life, – Natalya Markovna smiles bitterly.

– They recently brought me a review of one of the central newspapers about the exhibition at the Lumiere Brothers Center. Under the picture “The Cook” it says “varnishing the Soviet reality”. Funny! In the picture, the plates were all broken, the cook was a babe with claws. And the interpretation is “varnishing reality.”. Maybe it’s because the cook’s face shines? And at the exhibition I heard an opinion about a photo from Stutthof concentration camp, remember, where the hand came out of the furnace: “He put his hand in it”. Can you imagine that?? Grandpa has a lot of footage from the camp. There are corpses under the stove. The stretcher-bearers with the corpses, it seems the Germans didn’t have time to send the bodies to the furnace. I pictured my father going to a concentration camp for the first time, and his state of mind as a result of what he saw. He came to the stove, a hand was lying beside it, he took it and put it into the stove in cold blood? You knew Mark Borisovich, can you imagine something like that??

– No, it seems to me, that’s why they survived and stood up to the war, because they had a strong moral base. And why did Mark Borisovich rejoice at Evzerikhin’s arrival??

– They were friends, then the war scattered them to different fronts. The meeting was unexpected. My father and I didn’t see each other during the war. We’re in evacuation, he’s at the front. We thought the war would end and they’d bring him home, but he was transferred to Kazan. My mother and I went to Kazan for New Year. We lived together for a while, then came home. My father returned to New York at the end of ’47, but we rarely saw him, on business trips. I started to see him more often when he retired and took care of his granddaughter. It was a question of whether I should quit my job or whether Grandpa should retire. He took it easy, didn’t consider it any sacrifice on his part. He happily took care of his granddaughter. He gladly photographed it, took it to school and took it away from school. Compared to him, I was a stepmother. As soon as I made a remark to her, my parents jumped on me.

– When Mark Borisovich retired, he was no longer engaged in photography?

– Only with my veterans. The division in which my father served had a sponsored school. He’d set up a museum in that school. Took pictures of all the veterans, printed pictures for them and for the museum. He made scrapbooks for the school. He was busy with his granddaughter during the day and typing at night. At the same time, because he was considered a “cool grandfather,” he would take pictures of his granddaughter’s classmates and print them. And in the summer, again for his granddaughter’s sake, he went to a pioneer camp and led a photography club there.

– But that’s what grandpa, the cool grandpa, had to do! He never went abroad after the war?

– Only in Bulgaria, in the rest house of the Union of Journalists of the USSR.

– And what were the sullenest years? Or was sullen all the time?

– No, the hardest part was the year from late ’52 to late ’53 when my father got a job. I was in the tenth grade. It wasn’t easy. It was a hard year.

– And lived on what? Mother didn’t work..

– It didn’t affect me very much. We never lived luxuriously. We didn’t live very well, but I was always dressed according to fashion. My mother sewed the clothes. She used to take her things to the pawnshop. She had a coat, a fur coat and two rings. She pawned them and re pawned them. Thanks to her we somehow survived a hard year and did not fall into poverty. Grandfather used to take a lot of pictures in the New York Zoo. I knew Vera Chaplina. Her book is illustrated with his photos. He wasn’t a whiner, never complained. He had an easy character. He’d get upset about something silly, and he’d get off easy. When something serious happened, he took it easy. I did everything thoroughly and rather slowly. Was deprived of bad habits.

– Remember something from your childhood?

– We shared a room in a communal apartment. My bed was behind a screen. Guests came. Played the gramophone. Mother loved to dance. I used to fall asleep to music. That’s how we lived in a kommunalka until 1966. Then my parents joined the cooperative, and we got this apartment. My daughter was just born. We were lucky it was a very cheap cooperative. We borrowed money from all our relatives. Then we paid it back.

– You say: business trips, business trips. But you used to take your family on vacation somewhere?

– Before the war, yes. My parents used to go on vacation to the south, and I was dropped off at my grandparents’ place in Rostov-on-Don, where my mother and father were from. In Rostov, when I was two years old, I got a zigeyuki bear, a muff. He still lives with us.

Natalya Markovna handed me a black muff-bear. I am amazed at his endurance, sturdiness and the quality of the zigye leather: it is worn in places, but the bear has kept its shape and one eye, and is very much alive.

– I love him very much. I played with him more than with dolls. He was with me in Barnaul, in the evacuation.

– Now, when you go through Mark Borisovich’s archive, your impression of him changes somehow?

– Yeah, no. I am convinced that I knew. For example, that the main thing for him after all was his work.

Attack. Going after the enemy. 1944

Running the infantry by tanks. Kursk Bulge. 1943

Meeting the Chelyuskin crew on the streets of New York. 1934

Manezhnaya Square. the 1930s

Under sail. Seliger. 1930s

Turn of History. Installing the star on the Spasskaya Tower of the Kremlin. 1935

Volga. 1930s

The cook. 1930s

Girl with an oar. 1930s