Alexander Grinberg (Aleksandr Danilovich Grinberg) was a Russian and Soviet photographer. Alexander Grinberg was one of the most respected Russian photographers of the 20th century. He experienced the Russian revolution, the Civil War, 2 world wars and Stalinist repression. He demonstrated a strong interest in photography from an early age, taking his first photograph at age 10. By the age of 22, he was already an active member of the Russian photographic community, where he became a leading creative force.... Here he began his association with Sergey Eisenstein, whom he photographed. His prestige was on the rise throughout the 1920s, until the early 1930s when under the storm of the cultural revolution, the pictorialist masters of Soviet photography came under fire as "depraved," and Grinberg fell out of favor. The new cultural policy dictated that any eroticism in artistic forms was a remnant of bourgeois idleness, and inappropriate.... http://www.nailyaalexandergallery.com/russian-photography/alexander-grinberg Since 1929, the year of the "Great Break", with the turn in the Soviet politics toward arts, his erotic photography was declared inappropriate for Soviet morale, as a feature of the "overindulged idleness of the rich". Nevertheless he risked exhibitions of semi-naked women, and was eventually sentenced to Gulag labor camps (1936–1939) "for distribution of pornography." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grinberg By 1939 he was released on early parole for good behavior and industriousness, but by then he had permanently lost his sense of smell. He resumed his work as a photographer for a variety of institutions, working for a modeling agency, photographing for fashion designers. Later, in the 1950s, he made portraits of various famous Soviet actors and scientists. After devoting his whole life to photography, Alexander Grinberg died in 1979. http://www.nailyaalexandergallery.com/russian-photography/alexander-grinberg undefined

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