Vasily Egorov (1914-2007) was born in 1914 in Moscow. In 1934, Yegorov began working at the SOYUZFOTO photo lab (TASS Photo Chronicle). After completing the courses of the All- Russian Society of Photographers, he became a photojournalist, and since 1939 — TASS special correspondent in Armenia. From 1942 to 1946 he served in the border troops as a photojournalist. From 1946 to 1979 he worked as a special TASS photojournalist, travelling on business trips to all the republics of the USSR and 40 countries of the world.
Egorov gained fame due to his reporting photography. Working as a special TASS photojournalist, he made photo reports from almost all large enterprises in Moscow. Egorov captured the activities of famous people of science and culture at that time. He shot the architecture of the capital and genre scenes on its streets.
The photographer was an innovator in political reporting, which was especially evident in his photographs about the meetings of Soviet and foreign political figures. Despite the experience of ideological censorship of the 1930s, he was the first to film heads of state in a different status — not as an official or symbolic person («father of peoples»), but as an ordinary person in life. His models are captured not in the process of labour or intellectual reflection on the fate of the country, but in the process of relaxation, holiday and individual entertainment. For example, he photographed Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro at lunch on a Georgian collective farm («Georgia. N. Khrushchev and Fidel Castro», 1963).
In 1971, the artist photographed the Chairman of the USSR Ministers A.N. Kosygin in a national headdress while visiting an Indian reservation in Canada ( photo A .. N. Kosygin in a headdress of a leader of an Indian tribe, 1971). A serious prime minister with dignity bears the burden of diplomatic debt. It seems that the photographer was the only one who dared to notice the comic nature of the official situation. The reporter was able to appreciate the mise-en-scene, types, atmosphere. Humour, observation, emotionality is the same distinguishing features of the best photographs of Yegorov as impeccable composition and accuracy of details.
Vasily Egorov, participant of the exhibitions «The Seven Years in Action», Moscow (1959-1965) and «USSR: the Country and People in Art Photographs» (1970-1976). In 2002, Vasily Egorov was awarded the highest award of the professional guild of photographers and the Golden Eye of Russia Journalists Union.
