The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center hosts Lev Borodulin’s exhibition “Foresee the Moment”

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center is hosting Lev Borodulin’s exhibition “Predict the Moment”, timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the famous sports photographer, author of numerous covers and reports of the Ogonyok magazine of the late 1950s and early 1970s. The textbook footage is supplemented by far less well-known shots taken in Israel, where Borodulin moved at the height of his fame in 1973. About his reporter’s fate tells Igor Grebelnikov.

Showing the photographs of Lev Borodulin (1923–2018) in a new way, which seems to have a round date, is actually not so simple. And this despite the fact that his legacy is huge. During the Soviet period, Borodulin filmed at a Stakhanovite pace: for almost fifteen years, his reports – mainly sports, but not only – were published on the covers and pages of Ogonyok, the most popular weekly. Yes, and having settled in Israel, where Borodulin emigrated at the age of 50, he eventually acquired regular customers. His son Alexander, also a photographer, recalls that after ten years of filming around the country commissioned by a local photo agency, “when all the postcards in Israel were signed ‘photo by Lev Borodulin’, customers began to come to him: the Ministry of Absorption, travel agencies, sports centers. In general, a lot was filmed, but also shown – be healthy. Anniversaries were regularly celebrated with exhibitions even during Borodulin’s lifetime: in the Multimedia Art Museum, which holds a large collection of his works, retrospectives were held every five years starting from the photographer’s 80th birthday. This exhibition is the first posthumous.

Its curators Maya Katsnelson and Maria Gadas tried to cover every decade of his work, to balance the Soviet and Israeli periods, and also to capture the continuity with the work of avant-garde photographers. By recomposing the shots, adding a section of photos of his famous predecessors and contemporaries, including Rodchenko, Shagin, Alpert, Evzirikhin, Khaldei, they managed to somewhat reduce the degree of that Soviet propaganda bravado with which sports shots of those times are often associated. In Soviet times, sport was one of the important tools of “soft power” in the confrontation with the West, and within the country, as usual, it united the nation – Borodulin managed to discern and show the human, emotional side in sports life, moreover, in hitherto unseen close-ups and pleasing eye angles. Of course, this coincided with the “thaw” request for the humanization of life, but it is obvious that there was a lot of personal in the choice of photographic specialization, in the passion for sports, in the ability to discern the joy of being in it.

Borodulin went through the whole war, returned without ranks, but with medals “For the Defense of Moscow” and “For the Capture of Berlin”, and also a member of the party (“At the front before the attack they said: you must die a communist, and everyone was accepted as a communist”) and the owner trophy watering can. With this camera, he will take pictures of soldiers returning from the front at the stations: unfortunately, those portraits for which the conquered paid with stewed meat and chocolate have not been preserved.

The earliest photograph at the exhibition is from 1949: families with children with colored balloons are filmed against the background of the monument to Pushkin. Borodulin was one of the first in Moscow to take color photographs and shoot on slides, and work in Ogonyok since 1958 – first freelance, and then in the editorial office – made it possible, including during business trips abroad, to acquire the most modern photographic equipment. Without this technique, the shots that made Borodulin the main sports photojournalist in the 1960s would not have come out. So close to the faces of swimmers or even under the feet of basketball players, the viewer has never been. The photographer was so captured by what was happening that it was transmitted to the viewer, especially if the frame was placed on the cover of Ogonyok magazine, which was conceived as our answer to the legendary American magazine Life. There were often movie stars, world leaders, all kinds of celebrities on the covers, the Soviet magazine responded to this with a completely different portrait series – workers at machine tools, collective farmers in the fields, athletes, children, pioneers, happy families, and in these staged portraits there is a desire for a beautiful, joyful , free life was so strong and undisguised that sometimes photographers and editors lost their vigilance. So it happened with the famous picture of Borodulin on the cover of the September 1960 “Spark” with a report from the Olympics in Rome: the photographer managed to capture a swimmer jumping into the water, in all the details of her perfectly shaped body. An “indignant reader” of the Pravda newspaper immediately reacted to the picture in a letter: the frame was accused of displaying formalism, even more rudely – “a flying ass” – Mikhail Suslov, a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU, who oversaw ideology, called the photo. However, things did not go further: Borodulin had no equal in Soviet sports photography.

During trips abroad, he also filmed the lives of ordinary people: something with propaganda sarcasm, like a London homeless woman in front of a telephone booth (the frame is called “Old England”), something with obvious respect: a Roman courtyard, where one of the players in football is dressed in a cassock (“Things of the world”).

No matter how successful a virtuoso of sports photography Lev Borodulin appeared to be, his desire to move to Israel in 1973 turned out to be stronger than the fact that sports in this country were much less developed than in the Soviet Union: for the first years he was out of work there. Today, in the wake of another mass emigration, the Israeli part of Lev Borodulin’s exhibition looks especially amusing. Views of Jerusalem, believers at the Wailing Wall, street scenes, the celebration of Purim, swimming in the Sea of ​​Galilee, training of recruits, memorable portraits of the first and only female prime minister Golda Meir and the returnee grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi – all this is masterfully filmed, although without jubilation, as on many “Ogonkov’s” shots. Israeli pictures are quieter, but they tell about how, already being elderly, you can see the world again and succeed in it.