Shooting Stalin: The Wonderful Years of James Abbe
Abbe, James
£19.00
Shooting Stalin: The Wonderful Years of Photographer James Abbe
Edited by Bodo von Dewitz and Brooks Johnson
Published by Museum Ludwig, Koln, 2004. Photography. Bilingual edition; English & German. Approx size: 29cm H x 25cm W (11 1/4"H x 9 3/4"W). 359pp / illustrated with b/w photographs throughout.
"Well then - get me photographs of Hitler coming out of a synagogue!" that’s what Kurt Korff told James Abbe in 1932, in the editor's office of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung in the Ullstein house, Berlin. Then, winking knowingly at his manager Kurt Szafranski, he added: "Or get me photographs of Stalin in the Kremlin." Smiling, photo journalist James Abbe accepted the second challenge, and was in fact the first foreigner ever to take Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's picture in his Kremlin office on the 13th April 1932. These images went around the world and added to the photographer's fame. Even today they are still reproduced extensively even though the 'life and work' of this extraordinary photographer has never been adequately recognized in the annals of this medium.
James Abbe returned to the States in 1937 and entirely gave up photography to pursue a career in radio, he vanished into oblivion. It was not until 1995 that the London National Portrait Gallery brought the photographer back to our attention, and in 2000 his work was honoured by the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.
Hand in hand with Kurt Korff and Kurt Szafranski, both of whom were forced to leave Germany when the Nazis seized power in 1933, James Abbe formed an ideal team that set new standards in photo journalism at that time and indeed, for the history of photo journalism as a whole. Astute, ingenious, uninhibited, smart, good at languages, highly versatile and mobile, James Abbe was the personification of the flying reporter that the readership of the day, with its hunger for pictures, demanded.
The title of this publication (with slight alteration), incidentally, was coined by James Abbe himself: He once said "Shooting dictators is great fun" alluding to, apart from his experience with Stalin, his photo sessions with Hitler, Franco and Mussolini and he called his memoirs 'My Wonderful Years', published as a series from 1962 onwards in the Oakland Tribune, the summary of his busy life.
Note: This is a bilingual edition, with text in both English and German.
Book condition: Very Good