The camera belonged to the famous photographer Viktor Ivanovich Borodin (1923 — 2003), who went to the front with the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. After graduating from the Moscow Red Banner Infantry School named after the Supreme Council of the RSFSR, the 18-year-old junior lieutenant got into the 227th Infantry Regiment of the 183rd Infantry Division. He received his baptism of fire near Prokhorovka on the Kursk Bulgewhere he was wounded. After the hospital he returned to the front. In 1944, in the battles near the village of Vladimirovka, Kirovograd region, he was seriously injured, his relatives were notified about his death, which turned out to be erroneous.
Returning from the war, Borodin graduated from the officers' school of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, worked as an investigator, but due to the consequences of his injury he was forced to leave the service in 1953.

He took up photography due to some life events: a friend offered to exchange the theatre binoculars that Borodin had brought back from the war as the only trophy for a camera. Borodin took the offer. Having received a camera, hefound special literature and started taking pictures.
The laboratory was directly under the bed — ordinary plates served as cuvettes. He made his first camera from an ordinary felt boot, and his first picture was published in the newspaper ‘Gorkovskaya Pravda’ in 1953. Borodin managed to capture Korolev, Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, Van Cliburn. With his camera, he travelled half of Europe and became a laureate of the USSR Journalists’ Union.