Emanuel Evzerikhin (1911-1984) was born in 1911 in Rostov-on-Don. His path in photography began quite early, already in 1929 he became a freelance reporter for the TASS Press Cliche. A few years later, Evzerikhin moved to Moscow to work in the country’s largest photo agency TASS Photochronicles. At first, the photographer shot Moscow a lot, mainly following the methods and traditions of the old schoolmasters. At the same time, he began experimenting with new ways of shooting, using sharp angles — a landmark technique of avant-garde photographers.
«The Girl with an Oar» (1938) is one of the most famous photographs of the sculpture of Shadra. This sculpture stood for a short time in Gorky Park. There was a lot of controversy about her. For example, they wrote that «the figure of a girl with an oar, decorating one of the new fountains of the park, does not create an integral image of the Soviet gymnastics and is not free from some elements of the erotic order and excessive stylization.» The sculpture soon disappeared, they said that she was sent to the park culture and rest in Lugansk, how much it stood there and why it was not cleaned is unknown. And the photograph of Emanuel Evzerikhin is still with us and has become the photographers’ business card.
Many photographs of Evzerikhin became textbooks and were published many times in periodicals and books. Being a professional photojournalist, he not only found exciting moments for shooting but also carefully built up the composition of each frame even in military conditions. He went through the whole World War II with the camera, shooting the defence of Stalingrad, the liberation of Rostov-on-Don, Taganrog, Novocherkassk, Donbas, the assault on Koenigsberg, and met the victory in Prague. In the postwar years, Evzerikhin continued to work for TASS, but the «struggle with rootless cosmopolitans» complicated his life, as did many other domestic photographers. Up until the 1980s, Evzerikhin was much less interested in experimental possibilities. His work was limited mainly to regulated protocol filming. Still, even in these conditions, Evzerikhin managed to find original solutions and remain an artist, which is especially noticeable in his shooting of parades and ZISs, where he returns to avant-garde methods.
The works of Emanuel Evzerikhin repeatedly participated in Russian and international exhibitions. Nevertheless, the legacy of the author received a comprehensive assessment only as a result of retrospective exhibitions of the beginning of the 2000s, and through the publication of monographs («Emmanuel Evzerihin » Palace Editions, 2007; «Emmanuel Evzerihin . Photos that were not there», SEPHEROT Foundation, 2013). Photographs of the author were included in many museum and archival collections, as well as private collections.