OVER four years, award-winning photographer and photojournalist James Hill used to set up a makeshift studio in Moscow’s Gorky Park on Victory Day. There he painstakingly photographed over 500 veterans taking part in the parades.

Now 15 of those images are on display in London’s Pushkin House in an exhibition by the Pulitzer prizewinner which marks the end of the second world war. The photographs were collected in the British Council-financed book Victory Day, which won the Book of the Year prize at the Moscow International Book Fair and 10 of the portraits are now in the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. 

“In 2006 I decided to go to Gorky Park to photograph female veterans of WWII,” says Hill. “The war saw the greatest mobilisation of women in military history and their role seemed to me both ignored and more fascinating than that of their male comrades. 

“Yet as these nurses, radio operators, ack-ack gunners and even one sniper stood in my field studio I felt a pang of remorse, seeing the medal- bedecked sailors and soldiers walking past.” 

He returned for the next three years until he had photographed more than 500 veterans.

Having watched these men and women for many years and seen their photographs in books and magazines, Hill was “fascinated by their pathos.” But, he recalls, there was something missing.

“Somehow the images seemed too melodramatic,” he explains, “as if they were portrayed as icons rather than people. “I wished to show them as they were — ordinary men and women, united by a just cause, like others who fought against nazi Germany and had ventured through the emotional and physical extremes of vicious conflict.

“As these veterans posed in front of me I watched their battle with age and, like anyone who has gone to war, the fight with those memories as well. “They stood proudly, sadly, joyously, their faces showing the bitter-sweet emotions of that day as they rejoiced in the memory of victory but also remembered those friends lost along the way. 

“If May 9 marks a national celebration of the defeat of nazi Germany, on a personal level it offers something far more complicated. 

“Though they reunite in Gorky Park for a festive lunch with songs, dances — and, naturally, a little vodka — the day invariably ends with tears.” Though it’s 70 years since the end of the war and only the very last of that generation are still alive, Hill is in no doubt as to why his work merits a wide audience. “Many of these men and women have already passed away since I photographed them,” he says. “But their faces remain to tell us of their sacrifices and the gratitude that we owe them.”

• James Hill: Russian Veterans, accompanied by a short film by Vyacheslav Sachkov of the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, runs at Pushkin House, 5A Bloomsbury Square, London WC1, until June 9. Free. Opening times: pushkinhouse.org