The Amazing Story of Henkin Brothers, the Men Behind this Unofficial 1930s Documentary Photography

Today, we’d like to share with you what might be one of the most amazing and, perhaps, most visually enticing stories Redaktsiya’s ever covered.
The Henkin brothers, the two photography enthusiasts who no one had even heard about up until that point, were taking photographs, which could now very well be posted online, - but they were doing so throughout the 1930s both in Leningrad and Berlin, where the two brothers respectively resided.
What fate had in store for both of them was tragic, yet period-typical. However, a huge surviving photo archive, which even features erotic content, sheds a completely different light on life back in the day - and it’s nothing like what we’re used to seeing in official documentary photography and works of professional photo-reporters.
Check out the amazing story of the Henkin brothers and their photographs up on our channel.
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The participants of the film in the order in which they appear in the documentary:
Alexey Pivovarov - author of the Redaktsiya
Alexandra Generalova - art journalist
Leonid Parfenov - journalist and documentary filmmaker
Gueorgui Pinkhassov - photographer, member of Magnum Photos
Olga Walther - granddaughter of Yakov Henkin
Daniel Girardin - photography specialist, art historian and curator
Elias Kulukundis - member of the Henkin Brothers Archive Association
Dmitri Konradt - photographer
Denis Maslov - great-grandson of Yakov Henkin
Evgeny Gimodudinov - archivist and historian of Rostov on Don
Grigorii Arosev - writer and specialist on Russian emigration in Berlin
Dimitri Ozerkov - art historian, curator of the 2017 Henkin Brothers photography exhibition at the State Hermitage
Manuel Biedermann - grandson of Emil Remde
Karen Baschkin Paul - daughter of Bernard Baschkin
Anatoly Razumov - historian, specialist on political repression in the USSR
Evgeniya Kulakova - сoordinator of the Final Address project
Contents:
00:00 The amazing story of the Henkin brothers and their photographs.
07:12 30s social media chronicling personal life and history
12:34 How film that had gone untouched for 80 years was developed
15:01 How did the brother’s parents die?
18:29 What was Yakov Henkin’s life in Leningrad like and what did he photograph?
22:10 1930s erotic photography
24:30 With his back to Stalin: how Yakov chronicled the political reality
27:00 Evgeny Henkin’s photographs from pre-war Berlin
30:00 The theremin, the most enigmatic instrument of the time
34:40 What do those places Evgeny photographed look like now?
38:00 Why do the photographs from Berlin and Leningrad look so similar?
40:30 What did the brothers use to take photos?
43:46 The Nazis’ rise to power through Evgeny’s lens
48:30 Why couldn’t the brothers’ photographs be printed?
53:00 Stories of the people pictured in the Henkins’ photos
56:00 Amorous Evgeny and family-oriented Yakov
1:00:00 Why did Evgeny decide to go back to the USSR in spite of all odds?
1:02:00 Why was he executed?
1:09:30 Evgeny’s memorial plaque in St Petersburg
1:11:30 How Yakov was killed in the war
1:14:30 What made it possible to save the film archive?
1:16:00 The Henkin brothers’ first photography exhibition
1:18:30 Do the lives of the people in the photographs bear any resemblance to our own?