‘Negatives are photographic truths’: the collector who fled Russia with a haul of second world war images

Ukrainian photographer Arthur Bondar has amassed a huge collection of pictures from often unknown photographers After pulling on white cotton gloves, Arthur Bondar carefully takes a handful of 4cm by 9cm negatives from an old cigarette box and holds them up to the light of his study window. Inverted images of a woman on a horse, a group of women tending cabbages in a field, laughing figures at the seaside, a woman posing as a military ship sails by, hover in front of him, almost ghostlike. Although they are tiny, he is able to make out key details such as the insignia on a uniform, or the…