The Cost of War: Pictures of the Home Front : Like Robert Capa, Dmitri Baltermants chronicled war. But, unlike Capa, the horror he photographed was in his own town. The late artist’s work finally comes to Los Angeles.

The battleground experiences of Dmitri Baltermants were not so unlike those of other Soviets during World War II. He had gone to the battle front as a young photojournalist, much as Western photographers W. Eugene Smith and Robert Capa, seeking to capture on film the heroic and tragic, horrific and awe-inspiring moments of war.

Baltermants was a mathematics student at Moscow University, paying his bills with occasional free-lance photography assignments for Izvestia magazine, when he was sent to document Soviet troops fighting in Eastern Poland. Nazi troops would later roll mercilessly onto Baltermants’ own homeland. And this is where his experiences differed from those of most of his contemporaries at Life magazine and elsewhere, even as he continued to photograph the horrors around him.

“Dmitri was actually in combat and taking part in the battle, and felt he was defending his country as well as taking photographs,” said Tatiana Baltermants, daughter of the late photographer. “For five years he wasn’t just going around with a camera. He probably spent half his time with a rifle.”

This hadn’t been some overseas thrill-seeking, a la Ernest Hemingway, who enjoyed carrying his own machine gun while reporting on the war in Europe. This was not a distant place. The Crimean city of Kerch was uncomfortably close to the Moscow home Baltermants shared with his mother. And it was here that 176,000 soldiers and civilians were killed by advancing Nazi troops.

The aftermath of this battle resulted in one of Baltermants’ best-known photographs, 1943’s “Grief.” In it a woman is overcome with emotion on encountering a fallen loved one on a muddy, storm-swept battlefield. And in the scattered crowd of survivors and the dead behind her, the scene is repeated again and again.

“The war for us, no matter who you are, left a mark on all of us that doesn’t disappear with time,” the daughter said.

Tatiana Baltermants, 47, was speaking on the occasion of her father’s first major commercial exhibition in the United States. She sat outside the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery in Santa Monica, where a collection of more than 50 Baltermants prints will hang until Nov. 10. Talking between repeated drags on a cigarette, she understood an interviewer’s questions posed in English but preferred answering through an interpreter.

“For him war photography was a very personal experience, a very personal feeling,” she said.

The 78-year-old photographer had worked to prepare this exhibition and he intended to accompany the show to Los Angeles. But he died in June of a kidney infection, complicated by an allergic reaction to prescribed drugs. Plans for the show were completed just a month before his death. Baltermants’ work had been shown extensively throughout Eastern Europe, but organizers at the Hawkins Gallery expressed hope that the exhibit would be part of a new appreciation of Baltermants’ work in the West.

And yet, much of Baltermants’ most compelling photography was not seen even in the Soviet Union for decades after the war. Images like 1941’s “Road of War,” of a Russian soldier lying dead on a muddy, snow-covered road, were deemed by authorities too demoralizing for exposure to the Soviet public. Even “An Attack,” with its near silhouette image of Soviet soldiers leaping dynamically over a battlefield trench, rifles and bayonets at the ready, remained unpublished for many years. The image was said to not follow the Soviets’ heroic Socialist Realism blueprint because the top of the soldier in the foreground was cropped out of the frame.

This was a persistent annoyance that Baltermants faced during much of his career, before the more relaxed years of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, even if the epic vision established during the war remained. As a key photographer and editorial board member of Ogonyok, the Soviet news magazine, Baltermants focused after the war on the workings of government, often accompanying leaders Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Gorbachev abroad.

The intensity of his work remained, epitomized in the exhibition with a decade-old photograph of Brezhnev, stone-faced and standing before a giant portrait of Lenin, cropped tightly and dramatically around him in the frame. But Baltermants’ work in this mode was again confronted with the constraints of Soviet publishing authorities. A humanizing photograph of Khrushchev trading forkfuls of food with a man during a trip to India was another work unpublished until recently.

“Pictures of these leaders in relaxed situations were considered disrespectful,” said his daughter, an editor for a Soviet foreign language publishing house. “Even now, a picture of Gorbachev with Bush in their shirt sleeves at Camp David to Soviet eyes looks very strange. They never showed them in relaxed, domestic situations before Gorbachev.”

Likewise, a stark portrait of a mine worker underground remained unpublishable because the worker was perspiring. The Soviet doctrine that emphasized a society working and living happily as a single, unified force limited the value of art to how it served that ideal. Depictions of humanity’s dark side were reserved for photographs from the West.

Causing further frustration for Baltermants and other Soviet photographers was a continuing debate over photography’s value as art at all, a discussion that has waged in the West for as many years.

“In regard to the recognition in our country of the art of photography,” Baltermants said in a 1989 interview with Aperture magazine, “the process has been a long and painful one, and has provoked the opposition of our orthodox artists.”

At the Santa Monica gallery, the Baltermants prints, some as large as 20 by 24 inches, waited to be hung in time for the show’s opening and a lecture by the photographer’s daughter. Owner Hawkins relaxed in his office, talking enthusiastically about the promising emergence of Baltermants and other Soviet photographers into the Western art world. He said he is trying to establish working relationships with other Soviet photographers.

“There were photographic artists in this country for decades and decades before it ever begun to be accepted as a fine art,” Hawkins said. “And the same has to be going on in the Soviet Union. It’s just up to us to find it.”

In 1987, Denver photography dealer Paul Harbaugh began to compile a 38-artist retrospective of Soviet war photography for exhibition in cities around the world. It was during this project that the 43-year-old Soviet photography enthusiast discovered the scope of Baltermants’ work.

With the encouragement of his daughter to seek further recognition outside the Soviet Union, Baltermants agreed to a Los Angeles show. And during two visits to Baltermants’ flat, Harbaugh helped organize the collection, gathering vintage and newer prints that the photographer stored beneath his bed, in boxes and elsewhere.

Harbaugh said he was stunned by the death of Baltermants. It was still more tragic, the dealer said, when he discovered that the photographer might have survived his final illness if there had been access to a dialysis machine, a far more common medical device in the United States than in the Soviet Union.

With the show, Harbaugh said he is hoping Baltermants’ fame will be catapulted to the heights he has deserved for at least 25 years. “It’s something that is long overdue.”

And next week, Tatiana Baltermants will be in Paris at the opening of another retrospective of her father’s work. It’s a collection of photographs that Harbaugh said should be seen by more people throughout the world.

Baltermants, he said, was a photographer who understood the costs of war better than most. Like his American counterpart W. Eugene Smith, the Soviet photographer suffered severe injuries during the war and spent about a year recovering in a hospital bed.

“Right today, war is imminent in the Persian Gulf,” Harbaugh added. “And if they could see some of these photographs, nobody would want to fight.”

Photographs by Soviet photojournalist Dmitri Baltermants G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 910 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica; (213) 394-5558. Open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays through Nov. 10. No admission.