Shooting Stalin: The 'Wonderful' Years of Photographer James Abbe

The retrospective catalogue of the American photojournalist James Abbe (1883-1973), published by Steidl for the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and built around the 1932 Kremlin sitting in which Abbe became the only foreign photographer permitted to portray Stalin.

Edited by Bodo von Dewitz and Brooks Johnson, the book reproduces more than 300 photographs in tritone. It opens with Abbe's theatre and film portraiture of the 1920s, when he photographed Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Josephine Baker and the Ziegfeld chorus, and follows him to Europe: the studios of Sergei Eisenstein and the Moscow theatre, the last years of the Weimar Republic in Berlin, the coming of the Nazis, and the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War. Abbe made a specialty of photographing leaders, Hitler, Mussolini and Franco among them, and the Stalin pictures, with the dictator at his desk under a portrait of Marx, are reproduced with the illustrated reportages in which they first appeared. Terence Pepper contributes an essay on the portrait work. Texts are in English and German.

The book accompanied the exhibition at the Museum Ludwig from 2 October 2004 to 9 January 2005 and received the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis. It is now out of print.