About Sovfoto

Sovfoto

Sovfoto was established in New York in 1932 as the American agency for Soviet photojournalism — described at its founding as the only agency representing Soviet photographic reporting in America. It received state-sanctioned photographs from the Soviet Union, printed in the USSR with English captions for a North American audience, and licensed them to American wire services, newspapers, magazines, book publishers and government users. After the Second World War it traded as Sovfoto/Eastfoto, adding the photography of the Eastern European communist states and China.

The agency still operates as Sovfoto/Eastfoto from New York, representing, among others, Russia's ITAR-TASS and China's Xinhua news agency, and maintaining a historical archive described as the largest collection of photographs of the Stalin-era Soviet Union outside the state archives in Moscow. Parts of that archive are now held by public collections, notably 23,116 vintage gelatin silver prints of 1936 to 1957 at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Canada, and the TASS Sovfoto Photograph Collection, dated 1919 to 1963, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Sovfoto's history is double-sided, and an honest profile must hold both sides. It was a channel of Soviet state publicity, distributing retouched, officially approved images. It was also, for decades, the only regular visual source on a closed society — a source American editors, scholars and even the United States government used because there was no other.

Establishment in New York, 1932

The Soviet Union established Sovfoto in New York in the early 1930s, with 1932 given as its establishment year, to distribute Soviet press photography throughout North America. The operation was a consignment system: photographs were selected in the USSR, frequently retouched before dispatch, and supplied with English captions written for North American readers, then licensed onward by the New York office to subscribers and picture buyers.

The timing placed Sovfoto in New York just as the illustrated magazine was becoming America's dominant popular medium and just before the United States extended diplomatic recognition to the USSR in 1933. For American publications, demand for Soviet pictures — industrialisation drives, the Red Army, Arctic exploration, theatre and film, collective farms and the personalities of the regime — far exceeded what any American staff photographer could obtain inside the Soviet Union. Sovfoto existed to meet that demand on Soviet terms.

Clients: wires, magazines, textbooks and the State Department

The agency's client list shows how completely it filled its niche. The Associated Press, International News Service and other major wire agencies paid subscription fees to license Sovfoto material and offered it onward to illustrated magazines such as Life, Time, Newsweek and Look, and to newspapers. School textbook publishers bought its images, as did communist-aligned and communist-sympathetic publications — but so, notably, did the United States State Department and branches of the armed forces, for whom Sovfoto was the only source of regular visual reportage on the Soviet Union.

That breadth is the essential commercial fact about Sovfoto. Whatever an editor's politics, if a layout needed a Soviet photograph, the New York office of Sovfoto/Eastfoto was where it came from. The agency's own later summary adds educational, special-interest and business and trade books and periodicals, and advertising, to the list of regular outlets for its pictures, and notes that it also handled special assignments for photographers in the countries it covered.

The New York office and its owners

After the Second World War, Sovfoto continued and expanded, adding imagery from the Eastern European countries of the communist bloc as well as China, and from the late 1940s it did business as Sovfoto/Eastfoto. The New York office moved repeatedly through Manhattan's midtown publishing district under a succession of American owners: Helen Black, at addresses on West 42nd and then West 44th Street, up to 1952; Edwin S. Smith, at 24 West 45th Street, to 1964; then Liuba Solov at 25 West 43rd Street.

Solov managed the business until 1974, when Leah Siegel took ownership. Siegel moved the office in 1987 to 225 West 34th Street and employed Victoria Edwards, who bought the company in the early 1990s. On Edwards's retirement her son Vanya Edwards took over as owner and manager. The agency's current address is given as 263 West 20th Street in New York. The continuity is remarkable: through the Cold War, the fall of communism and the digital transformation of picture libraries, a single small New York agency remained the American address for Russian and former Soviet-bloc photography.

War photography and the first pictures of atrocity

At the outbreak of the Second World War, many Soviet photographers became war correspondents, bringing the visual language of the revolutionary avant-garde to documenting Soviet troops, destruction and German atrocities. Sovfoto coverage of the Red Army's advance, produced by Russian photographers turned correspondents, reached Associated Press offices in New York by radio transmission from Moscow as early as August 1944.

Those transmissions carried some of the first photographic evidence of the Holocaust to reach America: images of residents of Lublin gathered around a pit of bodies of people killed by the German occupiers, and of the cremation ovens at the Lublin camp, captioned by Sovfoto as the camp of annihilation. During the Korean War, Eastfoto images of American prisoners of war distributed by Sovfoto led to the identification of at least two of the pictured American combatants — a reminder that the agency's pictures functioned as genuine news documents, scrutinised by families and officials, not only as publicity.

The photographers in the archive

The Sovfoto archive preserves work by many anonymous photographers and by the leading names of Soviet photography, many of whom, after the cultural crackdown of 1932, found press photography the only available means of expression. Yevgeny Khaldei, maker of the Victory Banner over the Reichstag image, covered the war throughout, from the liberation of Sevastopol to the Potsdam Conference and the Nuremberg trials. Dmitri Baltermants, an Izvestia and Ogonyok photographer twice wounded at the front, made Grief, the celebrated image of village women searching for relatives after a 1942 massacre near Kerch.

Max Alpert of Pravda and TASS made the front-line photograph known as Combat, a symbol of the Soviet war effort. Arkady Shaikhet, a founder of the magazine Soviet Photo in 1926, photographed Stalingrad and the liberation of Kiev. Alexander Vorontsov filmed and photographed the rescue of children at the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945. Samary Gurary's portrait of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta appeared on the front page of Pravda. The presence of such work in a commercial New York picture library is a large part of the archive's scholarly value.

Retouching, propaganda and the question of trust

Sovfoto pictures were state-sanctioned and propagandistic in purpose: they presented the progress and achievements of communism as the Soviet state wished them seen, were printed and often retouched in the USSR, and were selected before they ever left the country. Retouching ranged from technical adjustment for halftone reproduction — backgrounds simplified, highlights sharpened — to outright manipulation. A MacLaren Art Centre exhibition of altered Sovfoto photographs used them to argue that the truth of a photograph is not fixed by its chemistry.

The most famous exposure came in 1950, when Newsweek showed that a Sovfoto picture of the 70-year-old Stalin casting his ballot in the March Soviet elections had simply pasted in a head shot of Stalin from years earlier. Yet the traffic was not all one way. In 1956 the columnist Stewart Alsop demonstrated how reliable information on Soviet weapons programmes could be extracted from Sovfoto images, after Aviation Week was summoned to the Pentagon for publishing supposedly top-secret photographs of the new Soviet Bison heavy bomber over Moscow — photographs its editor protested had simply been obtained from Sovfoto. Closed societies leak through their own publicity, and American analysts learned to read Sovfoto accordingly.

McCarthy-era suspicion and foreign-agent registration

As a communist-bloc agency operating openly in New York, Sovfoto inevitably attracted suspicion in the McCarthy era. When the agency released photographs purporting to show American biological warfare — a Soviet-bloc allegation of the Korean War period — its then owner, Edwin Smith, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about his role in their publication.

Smith was registered as a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The Attorney General's report on the act's administration for 1955 recorded propaganda photographs for the USSR being distributed by Edwin S. Smith doing business as the Sovfoto Agency, together with material from communist China, and listed the constellation of agencies and legations he represented, from Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga in Moscow and Czechoslovak and Hungarian photo services to China Photo Service in Peking and Agerpress in Bucharest. Sales of photographs in 1955 brought in $40,872.75. None of this was clandestine: the agency's position was that of a declared, registered distributor — which is precisely why its records are so informative for historians.

The Family of Man and cultural reach

Three Sovfoto pictures, credited to the agency, appeared in The Family of Man, the landmark 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibition curated by Edward Steichen. Sponsored by the United States Information Agency — America's own publicity arm — the exhibition toured the world to some nine million visitors, and was shown at the Moscow trade fair in Sokolniki Park, site of the 1959 Kitchen Debate between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon. That Soviet agency photographs could sit inside an American-sponsored celebration of universal humanity captures Sovfoto's ambiguous, indispensable place in Cold War visual culture.

Its pictures also served American creativity directly: Lillian Hellman, writing the screenplay for The North Star, relied on Sovfoto location pictures to recreate the Ukrainian village of Kamenetz Podolsk, and anthropologists used its imagery as visual evidence — Ruth Benedict's study of child-rearing in Eastern European countries drew on Sovfoto photographs showing the prevalence of swaddling.

The archive and its collections today

The Sovfoto archive covers Russian and Soviet life from the era of the Tsars through Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin to the present; the former Soviet republics and Baltic states; an extensive China file from all provinces including Tibet and Inner Mongolia; and Eastern Europe, for which Sovfoto/Eastfoto was for years the exclusive American source of national news-agency images. Special collections include the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the Second World War, the Korean and Vietnam wars seen from the other side, the Soviet space programme, the performing arts and cinema, and the fall of communism in the 1990s.

Two public deposits anchor its preservation. The MacLaren Art Centre's Sovfoto Archive, donated in 2001, comprises 23,116 vintage gelatin silver prints dated 1936 to 1957, concentrated on the Second World War and on Soviet life before and after it. The University of Massachusetts Amherst holds the TASS Sovfoto Photograph Collection, dated 1919 to 1963 and concentrated in 1943 to 1963. Curator Margarita Tupitsyn, author of a study of early Soviet photography, has praised the archive's artistic and documentary strength and the research value of the annotations on the backs of its prints.

Sovfoto/Eastfoto in the present day

Until the fall of the Soviet bloc, Sovfoto remained the exclusive legitimate source of news photography from the communist countries in the American market. It did not close with the Cold War. As Sovfoto/Eastfoto it continues from New York, representing some 30 independent photographers as well as national agencies — ITAR-TASS in Russia, Xinhua in China, CTK in the Czech Republic, MTI in Hungary and Rompres in Romania among those listed by the firm — and receiving regular coverage of current events and features from the regions it has always covered.

For the WorldNM directory, Sovfoto is thus a living entry with a historic core: founded in 1932 as the Soviet Union's American picture window, suspected and registered in the 1950s, mined by editors and intelligence readers alike, and preserved today both as a working stock agency on West 20th Street and as one of the great surviving archives of twentieth-century press photography.