Alexander Grinberg (Aleksandr Danilovich Grinberg, Александр Данилович Гринберг, 1885–1979) was a Russian and Soviet photographer. In 1908 he was awarded the silver medal in the all-Russian photo exhibition in Moscow and the gold medal in the international photo- exhibition in Dresden. He was the neighbour of Alexander Rodchenko, living on the same floor in Kandinsky’s owned building, but prefered pictorialist photography.
Since 1929, the year of the “Great Break”, with the turn in the Soviet politics toward only realist-socialist arts, Grindberg pictorialist and especialy erotic photography was declared inappropriate for Soviet morale, as a feature of the “overindulged idleness of the rich”. Nevertheless he risked one more exhibition of semi-naked women in 1935, and was eventually sentenced to Gulag labor camps (1936–1939) “for distribution of pornography.”
The request for deletion of the conviction of Alexander Danilovich Grinberg
Artist-photographer (born in 1885 in Moscow), professor at the Institute of Cinema in Moscow, decorator of Lenin Museum in Moscow, arrested «for the dissemination of pornography» January 15, 1936 and sentenced to five years of camp penitentiary.
He did his sentence in Bamlag (= Baikalo-Amourskii ispravitel’no trudovoi-lager ‘, part of GULAG NKVD) in the Amur region (the Far East of the USSR), as a photographer and Bureau Chief camp photography.
Grinberg was released on March 25, 1939 (as “udarnik”). And soon, on 15 May of 1939 he was allowed to resume his professional activity as the photographer of the Museum of History and Fine Arts at Zagorsk (old-Troitze Sergieva = Lavra Lavra of the Holy Trinity St. Sergius).
In his application dated 15 February 1941 he requested the annulment of the conviction, because he thought the judgment absolutely unfounded:
— “I confess that as a photographer-artist, sometimes in my free time, I was taking nude pictures for exhibition purposes … those nudes were exposed in the exhibition “Masters of Soviet photography” in Moscow in April-May 1935 and received from the jury a mention and an award consisting of some travel I could not do because I had too much work then at the Lenin Museum ….
— I made some very good pictures with the models … — I find the judgment absolutely unfounded
— I promise to work diligently for the wealth of our country, the Soviet Government and the Communist Party…
