Anatoly Garanin
The Ballad of Life in Soviet Russia
In 1912 Anatoly Garanin was born into a wealthy Moscow family, whose fate was determined
by the tumultuous events of the 20th century. His mother was of aristocratic lineage. His
father, Sergei Garanin, a successful broker, volunteered for the Red Army in 1918. After the
revolution the family, deprived of property, huddled in a small room in a communal apartment
in Moscow. When he was 15, in 1927, he put together a home-made camera. And by 1930,
he was already employed on
the staff of the Vechernyaya Moskva newspaper. Anatoly Garanin documented the unfolding
of Russia's Soviet history and inaugurated his career as a photographer for a prominent
magazine that was meant to show Soviet life abroad and called Soviet Union. From the early
1920's on, he has built a reflective visual portrait of his country. He was invisible but
everywhere, whether in an open-pit plane shooting from the sky or on a cart pulled by a
donkey shooting what's on earth; streaming in the pouring rain in front of the Red Square or
dressed as a medic in a uniform that fits him like a costume. Garanin - Anatoly Garanin -, who
was shy enough to be the perfect anti-hero of photojournalism: an anti-Capa character telling
anti-stories. He died in 1990 just one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union.