Shaikhet, Arkady Samoilovich (August 28/September 9, 1898, Nikolayev — November 18, 1959, Moscow), a master of Soviet photography and one of the founders of Soviet photo reporting.
In 1922-1924 Shaikhet worked as a retoucher at a private photo studio in Moscow. Dmitry Brazul, who headed the ROST, was the first to sense his great potential and to recommend that Shaikhet take his photographs to the Rabochaya Gazeta and the Krasnaya Niva and Moskovsky Proletarii magazines. His works soon attracted attention. In 1925 Mikhail Koltsov invited Shaikhet to join the Ogonyok editorial office. Work for the Ogonyok offered heretofore unheard-off opportunities: suffice it to mention that an aircraft was purchased specially for the Ogonyok editorial office to enable photographers to attend important events practically in any part of the huge country. When the Shatura regional electric power plant was inaugurated in 1926, Arkady Shaikhet took his most famous photograph, the Ilyich Lamp. His other photographs celebrated collective farm workers, Red armymen and athletes. In the 1920s and 1930s Shaikhet also collaborated with the SSSR na Stroike and Nashi Dostizheniya (Our Accomplishments) magazines, chronicling the early Five-Year Periods in his photo reports.
Several of his photographs were first exhibited at a show staged by the Association of Moscow Photo Reporters in 1926. In 1928 Shaikhet already contributed 60 of his photographs to the exhibition “Soviet Photography over the Past Decade” that were favorably received by critics and the press. In 1931 Shaikhet contributed his works to an exhibition of Ogonyok photographers in London.
During the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) he took many frontline pictures as a Frontovaya Illustratsiya newspaper correspondent. He photographed combat operations at different fronts, including outside Moscow and Stalingrad, at the Kursk Bulge and in the Battle of Berlin. He was awarded two Orders and several medals.
After the war he resumed work at the Ogonyok magazine.