Photo Exhibition ‘Faces of War’

A photo exhibition ‘Faces of War’, dedicated to the 70th anniversary of World War II has opened at HSE – Nizhny Novgorod. The exhibition includes about 200 unique photographs from private collections and various archives in the USA, Germany and the USSR, showing the battle scenes from the European, Eastern, African and Pacific theatres of war.

Natalya Gronskaya, Deputy Director at HSE Nizhny Novgorod made her feelings clear at the opening ceremony:

‘This exhibition makes great impression on our feelings and emotions.  Though sometimes we need such emotional distress so that we can remember and understand what lies behind the word ‘war’. And we can once again recognize the wisdom of the proverb that a bad peace is better than a good quarrel. And no matter what the conflict is, the parties should try to do their best to come to an agreement as the consequences of an unwillingness and inability to continue a dialogue are right here in front of us in these photos’.

According to Radislav Kaurkin, Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics and Intercultural Communication, the exhibition highlights the scale of the war and the tremendous human tragedy of the 1940s: ‘We can see the war in emotions: despair, hopelessness, insanity, celebration, love, nobility – all these feelings are in people’s eyes in the pictures.’

Special attention is given to the first period of the Great Patriotic war and the fate of captured Soviet prisoners. Oleg Kazarinov, Executive Secretary of the Nizhny Novgorod Restorers Union, stressed that a lot of unique photos were taken during the war, but only the pictures that could help us ‘look into the face of war’ were selected for the exhibition.

Anastasia Vorobiova, student of the Faculty of Humanities, shared her impressions of the exhibition:

‘It’s hard to look at these black and white pictures for a long time. But it’s also hard to look away. The war that has already turned into some kind of a virtual concept for my generation, the war that we know only from books and movies just looks directly at us from these pictures, we see it in the eyes of soldiers and prisoners, wounded and dead people, the elderly and children. No matter what nationality the person is, in life we are different, but death is the same for all people, and for all of us it is frightening’.

The exhibition is open until October 16. Address: 25/12 Bolshaya Pecherskaya, Room 126.