CAMERA THAT KHALDERI USED GOES UP FOR AUCTION

AS reported in 'St Petersburg Times' : CAMERA THAT KHALDERI USED GOES UP FOR AUCTION The St. Petersburg Times Published: July 12, 2014 (Issue # 1819)

The camera that photographer Yevgeny Khaldei used to take the iconic photo of Red Army soldiers raising the flag over the Reichstag will be sold at auction later this year. The camera, a Leica, is expected to sell for between $393,000 and $582,000 at a Bonhams auction on Nov. 30. Khaldei was working for Soviet news agency TASS when he took the shot. He had traveled with Red Army since 1943 all the way to Berlin. Khaldei began work as a photo journalist for TASS in the mid-1920s but was dismissed in 1948 for "resting on his laurels." Khaldei himself attributed his sacking to anti-Semitism. He only became known in the West in the 1990s after the fall of communism. His reputation rests mainly on his wartime work and the photographs he took at the Nuremburg Trials of Nazi war criminals in 1946. He used the Leica camera that will go up on the auction blcok for much of his career including his documentation — rifle in hand — of the Red Army’s drive from 1943 onwards to push the Germans out of Russia which culminated in the fall of Berlin. "It is a great privilege to be selling a camera with such evocative associations. Raising a flag over the Reichstag is a defining image of victory over evil which affected people deeply at the time and has continued to resonate for later generations," said Bonham's head of scientific instruments Jon Baddeley in a news release.