Arkady Shaikhet: Selected Photographs 1924-1941

Arkady Shaikhet: Selected Photographs 1924-1941 at Nailya Alexander Gallery. "...Arkady Shaikhet (1898-1959) was born in the city of Nikolaev (Ukraine) into a lower middle class Jewish family (his father was a wholesale beer trader and his mother had a seamstress shop). He moved to Moscow in 1922 where he found work as a re-toucher at the Rembrandt studio. His first photographs were published in 1923, and he soon joined a group of young talented photographers who helped establish the USSR’s most important illustrated magazines. In 1924, at the age of 26, he became one of the leading photojournalists for the newspapers Krasnaya Niva and Moscow Proletarian. The following year, Shaikhet joined the staff of the national magazine Ogonyok and from the very beginning his photographs were used for the covers. Shaikhet was one of the founders (together with famous journalist Mikhail Koltsov) of Soviet Photo in 1926 and from 1930 on, he actively contributed to USSR in Construction. Because of his close collaboration with Mikhail Koltsov, Shaikhet’s career skyrocketed between 1924 and 1931, and he became a leading photojournalist in the country."