Arthur Bondar looked forward to childhood summers when he shuttled between his grandmothers, who lived in different rural areas of Ukraine. He wandered the countryside picking mushrooms and fishing, and at night he listened to their stories about World War II, when the Nazis pressed them into slave labor. He grew so fascinated by the Ukrainian wartime experience that when he became a photographer, he spent years documenting that generation of Ukrainian and Russian veterans.
“I consider all of the older generation who went through World War II, like my grandmas, to be heroes of that generation,” he said.
Earlier this year, Mr. Bondar heard that the family of a Soviet war photographer was selling his negatives. The photographer, Valery Faminsky, had worked for the Soviet Army and kept his negatives from Ukraine and Germany meticulously archived until his death in 2011. Mr. Bondar had seen many books and several exhibits of World War II photography but had never heard of Mr. Faminsky.
He contacted the family, and when he viewed the negatives Mr. Bondar realized that he had stumbled upon an important cache of images of World War II made from the Soviet side. The price the family was asking was high — more than Mr. Bondar could afford as a freelance photographer — but he took the money he had made from a book on Chernobyl and acquired the archive.
“I looked through the negatives and realized I held in my hands a huge piece of history that was mostly unknown to ordinary people, even citizens of the former U.S.S.R.,” he said. “We had so much propaganda from the World War II period, but here I saw an intimate look by Faminsky. He was purely interested in the people from both sides of the World War II barricades.”
Most of the best-known Soviet images from the war were used as propaganda, to glorify the victories of the Red Army. Often they were staged. Mr. Faminsky’s images are for the most part unvarnished and do not glorify war, Mr. Bondar, 33, said, but focused on the human cost and “the real life of ordinary soldiers and people.”
Mr. Faminsky’s family had a two-page autobiography that he dictated shortly before he died. He said that he was born in Moscow in 1914 and that his parents both served in the Red Army from 1918 until the end of the civil war. He started photographing and working in a darkroom as a teenager, joined the army in 1941 and photographed for the Soviet secret police in the city of Kemerovo.
After becoming a staff photographer at the Military Medical Museum of the Red Army in Moscow, he was soon sent to the Belorussian front to document first aid and the medical treatment of wounded solders. He photographed often on the front lines, including in Crimea and throughout Poland. He often focused on medical care for soldiers and injured civilians.
“When I shoot during the wartime I came back to the nearest hospital to develop all my negatives and sent it to Moscow as soon as possible,” Mr. Faminsky wrote. “Sometime I was sent back to Moscow and from there went to other locations on the frontlines of WWII.”
In May 1945, he photographed the Red Army’s final assault on Berlin and sent prints to the Military Medical Museum of the Red Army. But he meticulously organized and kept the negatives, rarely sharing them with anyone.
Mr. Bondar says that people on all sides of the war would benefit from seeing Mr. Faminsky’s images.
“Germans should see his photos of the end of the war in Berlin, but Russians and Ukrainians need to see it, too, because we never studied anything from our past that we did wrong,” said Mr. Bondar, who grew up mostly in Ukraine and now lives in Moscow with his Russian wife, the photographer Oksana Yushko.
“Germans learn about the Nazis and the Holocaust in school, but we only look at what we did the best,” he added.
Mr. Bondar has started scanning many of Mr. Faminsky’s negatives from the end of the war in Berlin but has yet to sort through much of the work from Crimea.
“You can hardly imagine today that Berlin looked like that,” he said. “People’s memories are so short and we forget the value of peace so fast. Maybe these photos will help remind people of that before the next war starts.”
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