Valuing Grief

This chapter traces Baltermants’s entry into the art photography market. In the mid-1960s, he had his first New York City exhibition alongside other well-known photojournalists, including Robert Doisneau and Irving Penn. From there his work was included in a Metropolitan Museum show, and he was often the lone Soviet representative in major photography shows. In the 1970s, Baltermants began giving Grief visual context by exhibiting other images taken that same wartime day in Kerch. In 1983, Baltermants had his first solo show in New York City, and although reviewers loved his wartime work, reviewers panned the overall show. The critical appreciation for his wartime work and disappointment at his postwar Soviet “propaganda” did not dampen a few intrepid collectors’ interest in bringing him to the Western art photograph market and adding financial value to the list of values his photography possessed.