Ervin Volkov (1920 — 2003) is a Russian-German photographer with an unusual destiny: he was the son of a Petersburg woman Nadezhda Volkova and a German soldier captured during the First World War. In 1942, he partly repeated the fate of his father, being captured by the Soviet Union and spending six years in the USSR. After that Volkov was sent to the GDR, where he worked as a journalist and photographer for various publications.
In 1957, Ervin Volkov went to shoot a large-scale report on life in the Soviet Union on the instructions of the East German newspaper Wochenpost. Sending a series of photographs to the editor every week, the author and his team drive through Murmansk, Krasnoyarsk Territory, Irkutsk Region, Baikal, the Far East, the entire Volga, the North Caucasus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Abkhazia, the Black Sea coast from Adler to Novorossiysk, Crimea, Ukraine, Belarus …
Unknown author. In the picture, Erwin Volkov. Belarus. 1957
His journey with a total length of ten years turns into literary and photographic travel notes about Russia (this is the only way he called the USSR). These notes are close to the genre of “film-travel”, where the road becomes not only and not so much the main scene of action, but a critical state, a form-building element. Ervin Volkov, travelling behind the wheel of a “Warburg” car, expected incredible adventures, fateful meetings and new companions, one of which was the Moscow photojournalist of the “Ogonyok” magazine Yuri Krivonosov. The meeting with him marked the beginning of a long friendship, and half a century later it was due to Krivonosov that the archive of Ervin Volkov became known.
His shooting style is close to the European tradition of street photography with its inherent looseness, freedom in choosing subjects and means of expression. Volkov’s photographs have no political overtones, accusatory intonation, overt or covert irony, or caricature of Soviet life. His attitude towards Russia and the Russian people is deeply personal. Primarily due to his origin, Erwin Volkov managed to capture the country from the inside, at first little familiar to him.
In 2014, the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography hosted the first personal exhibition “Erwin’s Road”, which displayed more than sixty black-and-white photographs of the 1950s – 1960s from the author’s newly opened archive.
In 2017, a photo album “Meetings and Farewells” was created, dedicated to the view of the Russian-German photographer on the USSR. This is an attempt to show how the European visual tradition can coexist with the reality of Soviet life with the help of witty and attentive photographs by Erwin Volkov.
