Page 4 - PROOF!v1

For four years, you applied for admission to the Military Air Force Engineering Academy of the Soviet Union. You were denied each time. How do you think your life would have turned out differently if you had been accepted?

You didn’t attend school to become a photojournalist – because there were none in the Soviet Union at the time. Yet you became a world- renowned photographer. Was it accident? Luck? Talent?

After graduation from university, you were assigned to be a chief mechanic. But when you arrived for work, your boss released you from your obligation. What did he see in you?

In your book People Among People, Yuri Krivonosov calls you a “photographer by the will of God,” and writes, “in the required moment he finds himself in the required place and truly at that moment God presses his finger on the button.” Do you agree? Is it possible for someone to learn photography?

You were a staff photographer for Soviet Union magazine for 14 years. From an American perspective, it was a propaganda publication. Were you a politically minded person during those years?

Looking through your photographs, we see Shostakovich speaking at the Composers Union; we see Khrushchev just before he was replaced by Brezhnev. Today, we tend to view these within a historical context. Did you ever think of yourself as a recorder of history?

Talk about the equipment you used. Was it readily available in the Soviet Union at the time?

Mikhail Gorbachev
Moscow 1992
Why?
Moscow 1957
Matvey Manizer, sculptor
Girls of Japan
Lake Baikal 1965
Pastors
Moscow 1960