Last year, photographer Arthur Bondar heard that the family of a Soviet war photographer was selling his negatives. The photographer, Valery Faminsky, had worked for the Soviet army and meticulously archived his negatives from Ukraine and Germany until his death in 2011. Bondar had seen many books and several exhibitions of photographs from World War II, but had never heard of Faminsky.

He contacted the family, and when he looked at the negatives, he realized he had stumbled upon an important repository of World War II photographs taken by the Soviet side. The price the family was asking was high—more than Bondar, as a freelance photographer, could afford—but he used the money he had earned from a book about Chernobyl to buy the archive. “I looked at the negatives and realized I was holding a huge piece of history that was unknown to most ordinary people, even citizens of the former USSR,” he told  The New York Times  . “We had so much propaganda from the World War II era, but here I saw an intimate view of Faminsky. He was exclusively interested in the people on both sides of the barricades of World War II.” Most of the most famous Soviet images from the war were used as propaganda to glorify the victories of the Red Army. They were often staged. Mr. Faminsky’s images are largely unvarnished and do not glorify the war, but rather focus on the human sacrifices and “the real lives of ordinary soldiers and people.”