Yevgeny Khaldei’s Banner of Victory appears in a new exhibition, Masterpieces of Soviet photography, at the Atlas Gallery in London. “It has such a great story attached to it, and a sense of mystery as well,” Atlas co-founder Ben Burdett tells BBC Culture. “It was a staged image – but staged for good reasons, because on the occasion when the banner was first raised, there wasn’t a photographer to capture the event. So the photographer went back the next day with the soldiers and restaged it because they wanted to have pictures of the Soviet banner over the Reichstag.”

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Lacking a banner, the soldiers carried a piece of fabric later said to have been stitched together from three red tablecloths by the uncle of the photographer, with the hammer and sickle sewn on. According to the New York Times, Khaldei’s father and sisters had been killed by the Nazis – after seeing the photo of the Iwo-Jima flag raising taken by Joe Rosenthal just over two months earlier, he asked his uncle to create the makeshift flag and took it to Berlin so he could craft his own version of the iconic image.