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  • A seller of flowers stands looking down a street in the Polish capital, Warsaw. Holding a single bouquet, the elderly man has located himself on the corner of Zapiecek Street (Zapiecek means place behind the stove) awaiting a buyer. With his hand on one hip, he has laid more yellow and red flowers that he has probably grown himself and is trying to make a meagre living from. But there are few people on this street this early in the oldest part of Warsaw and the walls appear to be damp, with discoloured plaster after decades of decay under a Communist government. Old paving slabs on the pavement and a cobbled road give a sense of history and wartime destruction for these streets saw many atrocities during the German occupation in WW2. This is a scene of pessimism and poverty yet with a small degree of hope in the fresh flowers.
    krakow_street-20-07-1990.jpg
  • In late afternoon, three conscript soldiers  of the Polish army are dressed in brown uniforms eating ice cream cones in Plac Zamkowy, outside the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Poland. The Polish army (Wojsko Polskie) is the name applied to the military forces of Poland. The name has been used since the early 19th century, although it can be used to refer to earlier formations as well. Polish Armed Forces consist of the Army (Wojsko L?dowe), Navy (Marynarka Wojenna) and Air Force (Si?y Powietrzne) branches and are under the command of the Ministry of Defense (Ministerstwo Obrony Narodowej). The combined Polish armed forces consist of 215,000 active duty personnel and in addition 450,000 reserves. The armed forces are made up of conscripts who serve for a period of 9 months, and professional soldiers.
    misc_poland12-06-09-2007.jpg
  • A spread of old Polish Zloty bank notes are spread out in the hands of a private market trader in Central Warsaw. His arms appear from the bottom left of frame and we can see a dozen or so notes of 2000 and 5000 and other denominations in an arc, held together with both thumbs. In the back ground and out of focus is the hustle and bustle of a summer's day at this market at a football stadium where Polish citizens come to sell and buy their possessions in the hope of making a little money to support meagre incomes. Women are inspecting clothing and materials on a stall in the open-air, under a bright sun. On the front-facing note is the medieval ruler Mieszko I though these notes were phased out in 1995 when hyperinflation forced, the currency to undergo redenomination.
    misc_poland05-06-09-2007.jpg
  • A cross in sunlight shows the Katyn memorial set in a forest in Warsaw, Poland. The Katyn war cemetery is a Polish military cemetery located in Warsaw commemorating the massacre of Polish officers during the second world war although the town of Katyn is a small village near Smolensk, Russia. It contains the remnants of 4,412 Polish officers of the Kozelsk prisoner of war camp, who were murdered in 1940 in what is called the Katyn massacre. The soldiers were buried in six large mass graves. Until 1991 it was known that the Nazis were responsible but after the end of Communism did they Russians admit that Stalin's forces killed the Poles. There is also a Russian part of the cemetery, where an undisclosed number of victims of the Soviet Great Purges of the 1930's were buried by the NKVD. The cemetery was officially opened in 2000.
    misc_poland11-06-09-2007.jpg
  • Displayed on a table at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, peaked caps of the former East German (DDR in German) border police are on sale in orderly rows for the sake of tourists to this German city. The border troops of the German Democratic Republic (Grenztruppen), were a military force of the GDR and the primary force guarding the Berlin Wall and the border between East and West Germany. The Border Troops numbered at their peak approximately 47,000 troops and other than the Soviet Union, no other Warsaw Pact country had such a large border guard force. In all, 1,065 persons were killed along the GDR's frontiers and coastline, often by the border guards. The East Germany state existed from 7 October 1949 until 3 October 1990 and was a potent symbol of a divided Europe during the Cold War.
    DDR_travel02-06_1990.jpg
  • On the edge of an old Soviet parade ground, peeling murals show an instruction mural for guarding prison camps seen in this army boot camp in the former East German peninsular called Halbinsel Wustrow near Rostock. For the benefit of recruits or as reminders of Soviet discipline, the picture shows a soldier standing at the barbed wire of a generic Gulag holding his AK-47 weapon and dressed in fur hat and uniform from that era. Perhaps those training here were eventually to guard political prisoners though it is a reminder of a fallen ideology. Wustrow was once a WW2 German anti-aircraft artillery position then housed civilian refugees before the eventual Soviet occupation of the former DDR during the Cold War, up until 1990 and the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall. The camp was ransacked and all its assets stripped before its desertion that summer.
    russian_wustrow03-16-06_1990.jpg
  • Young men shovel brown coal from street level, and into a cellar after being dumped by delivery men on a street in Aue, a mining town in the Ore Mountains known for its copper, titanium, and kaolinite. The town was a machine-building and cutlery manufacturing centre in the East German era with a population of roughly 18,000 inhabitants. It was the administrative seat of the former district of Aue-Schwarzenberg in Saxony and part of the Erzgebirgskreis since August 2008, on 15th June 1990, in Aue, Saxony, Germany.
    german_coal-04-11-1990.jpg
  • A coal delivery man deposits chunks of brown coal into the cellar via a conveyor belt for an elderly lady who stands outside in the bitter cold wearing only a housecoat this grim day. Her slippers can be seen standing among fallen briquettes that have dropped on to the wet cobbled street as the man oversees the delivery from a truck that has backed on to the pavement near a junction. A passing Trabant car rattles up the hill past a mother who pauses to ensure a safe crossing for her baby. Aue is a mining town in the Ore Mountains known for its copper, titanium, and kaolinite. The town was a machine-building and cutlery manufacturing centre in the East German era with a population of roughly 18,000 inhabitants. It was the administrative seat of the former district of Aue-Schwarzenberg in Saxony and part of the Erzgebirgskreis since August 2008..
    DDR_travel04-06_1990.jpg
  • On the edge of an old Soviet parade ground, peeling murals show the physical style of Russian marching techniques seen in this army boot camp in the former East German peninsular called Halbinsel Wustrow near Rostock. For the benefit of recruits or as reminders of Soviet discipline, the picture shows a soldier marching in that unmistakable goose-stepping style reminiscent of the Nazi era, with high forward kicks and a strenuous arm movement to the chest as seen in iconic May Day celebrations in Red Square. Wustrow was once a WW2 German anti-aircraft artillery position then housed civilian refugees before the eventual Soviet occupation of the former DDR during the Cold War, up until 1990 and the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall. The camp was ransacked and all its assets stripped before its desertion that summer and is a reminder of a fallen ideology
    russian_wustrow02-16-06_1990.jpg
  • A new Trabant car shell is lifted by forklift from a truck at the East German auto maker VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau in Zwickau, Saxony.  A worker carefully manoeuvres the unfinished bodywork into a crate where other vehicles await completion on the production line. The Trabant was the most common vehicle in East Germany - Like the Beetle in the West, its Peoples' Car with a 595 cc, two-cylinder air-cooled engine. It had space for four, was compact, light and durable with its distinctive body shape constructed from Duroplast panels attached to a galvanized steel shell. It was in production without any significant changes for about 34 years, becoming a symbol for the cheap, cheerful and polluting possessions for Communist Europeans. When the Berlin Wall eventually fell, Trabants coughed and spluttered onto West German roads for the first time.
    DDR_travel03-06_1990.jpg
  • On the edge of an old Soviet parade ground, peeling murals show the physical style of Russian marching techniques seen in this army boot camp in the former East German peninsular called Halbinsel Wustrow near Rostock. For the benefit of recruits or as a reminder of Soviet discipline, the picture shows soldiers marching in that unmistakable goose-stepping style reminiscent of the Nazi era, with high forward kicks and a strenuous arm movement to the chest as seen in iconic May Day celebrations in Red Square. Wustrow was once a WW2 German anti-aircraft artillery position then housed civilian refugees before the eventual Soviet occupation of the former DDR during the Cold War, up until 1990 and the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall. The camp was ransacked and all its assets stripped before its desertion that summer and is a reminder of a fallen ideology
    russian_wustrow01-16-06_1990.jpg
  • Detail of a rusty Wartburg 312 car standing at the kerbside in an eastern Berlin district. A sticker with the letters DDR as the German Democratic Republic (DDR in German and GDR in English) as East Germany was called during the Cold War. Any car was a highly-prized possession when ownership of luxury goods like vehicles aroused suspicion for other than Communist Party officials. This car may have been someone of rank or influence. The GDR was a self-declared socialist state, referred to in the West as a "communist state" in the Soviet Sector of occupied Germany created after the second world war and partitioned when DDR leaders built the Berlin Wall that eventually segregated Germany and Europe. The East Germany state existed from 7 October 1949 until 3 October 1990 and was a potent symbol of a divided Europe during the Cold War...
    DDR_travel01-06_1990.jpg
  • A young skateboarder leaps into the air beneath the huge memorial to the German Communist leader Ernst Thalmann, the leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during much of the Weimar Republic. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and held in solitary confinement for eleven years, before being shot in Buchenwald on Adolf Hitler's orders in 1944. The Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation, consisting of the Young Pioneers and the Thälmann Pioneers, was a youth scouting-styled organisation of schoolchildren aged 6 to 14, in East Germany. Its motto was" "Für Frieden und Sozialismus seid bereit - Immer bereit" ("For peace and socialism be ready - always ready") but the Pioneers were disbanded in 1989 after early protests here in Leipzig at the same time as the Berlin Wall and the Socialist state's fall.
    DDR_travel05-06_1990.jpg
  • Lying horizontal in a Budapest scrap yard are two Communist-era statues that were toppled along with the fall of the Hungarian Socialist state in March 1990. In the foreground is the statue of the once-hated Hungarian local Communist Ferenc Munnich who participated in the 1956 Hungarian revolution, then a member of the 'Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Government', the Workers' Militia and then defence minister and earning himself the Order of Lenin in 1967. After Hungary's transition to a democracy, he has been dumped horizontally on a wooden frame, sliced off its original plinth at the feet and painted red, awaiting its fate. In fact this statue is now located in the theme park called Szoborpark (Statue Park) in the south of the city where he shares a political tourist landscape of 42 pieces of art from the Communist era between 1945 and 1989.
    communist_statue-13-06-1990.jpg
  • A detail from the oversized artwork entitled Brotherhood Kiss (Bruderkuss) by Dmitry Vrubel that once adorned a section of the notorious Berlin Wall in western Germany Russian. Two seemingly gay men are kissing on the lips but this is one of the most famous paintings - a symbol of a divided Europe during the Cold War. It shows Communist Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev kissing his East German (DDR) counterpart Erich Honecker, which was ultimately copied on to coffee cups and T-shirts across the world before being destroyed by the authorities. The artist was angry but he says he will paint a new image which was derived from a photograph of the two leaders taken 1979 but became a potent symbol of Communism's corruption and ultimate failure.
    berlin_wall_kiss-04-11-1990.jpg
  • The celebrated tomb of Polish-born composerFrédéric François Chopin in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, Paris. Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of French-Polish parentage. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music. Chopin was born in ?elazowa Wola, a village in the Duchy of Warsaw. A renowned child-prodigy pianist and composer, Chopin grew up in Warsaw and completed his music education there; he composed many mature works in Warsaw before leaving Poland in 1830 at age 20.
    pere_lachaise17-19-08-2012.jpg
  • The celebrated tomb of Polish-born composerFrédéric François Chopin in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, Paris. Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of French-Polish parentage. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music. Chopin was born in ?elazowa Wola, a village in the Duchy of Warsaw. A renowned child-prodigy pianist and composer, Chopin grew up in Warsaw and completed his music education there; he composed many mature works in Warsaw before leaving Poland in 1830 at age 20.
    pere_lachaise18-19-08-2012.jpg
  • Sitting among others in long grass a middle-class lady reads the high-circulation Daily Mail newspaper during a lunchtime break at the Chelsea Flower Show, in London England. The front page headline reads 'Icy Blast from the Kremlin' in an echo from the darkest days of the Cold War, when western media fuelled the insatiable appetite for propaganda. But this scene is from May 1989 before the fall of the Berlin Wall and when the eastern states of the Warsaw Pact were still ruled by their Communist masters. Visitors to this annual horticultural event either sit in the cool shade or like this woman who appears comfortable cross-legged in sandals and a summer dress, stays under the hot mid-day sun with her tabloid format paper spread and with her possessions kept in a shoulder bag.
    chelsea_lady05-26-1989.jpg
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