Ivan Shagin (1904—1982) was born in Yaroslavl province. From 1921 he was a sailor in the Volga River Shipping Company. Since 1924 he lived in Moscow and in 1925 he started to study in the photographic circle at the newspaper ‘Nasha Zhizn’. His first works were published in 1928. From 1930 he was a photo correspondent for the newspapers ‘Nasha Zhizn’ and ‘Co-operative Life’, from 1932 he was a photo reporter for the magazine ‘Kollektivist’. He published a series of photo essays about the life of workers and collective farmers.
The themes in Ivan Shagin’s work are vast: physical training parades, army reports, demonstrations. The images from his photographs convey the energy of youth, folk beauty with its cult of healthy spirit and strong body. Ivan Shagin was among the elite of Soviet photojournalism. Since 1934 he actively participated in international photo exhibitions. During the Great Patriotic War he was a military photo correspondent of the newspaper ‘Komsomolskaya Pravda’, he shot on many fronts, the war ended in Berlin.
After the war Shagin continued to work in ‘Komsomolskaya Pravda’. In autumn 1945, six months after the Victory, the newspaper commissioned him to shoot the tour of Moscow ‘Dynamo’ in Britain, which caused quite a stir. Shagin was the only Soviet photojournalist in London at the time. Shagin’s photographs filled the pages of all Soviet newspapers. In the late 1940s, Shagin mastered colour photography and soon became one of the leading authors in this field. Ivan Shagin participated in photo exhibitions both in the USSR and abroad (USA, Japan, Great Britain).