David Sholomovich was born in 1914 in Samara, which lay outside the Pale of Settlement for Russian Jews, in a family of civil servants.After finishing school in his native city, he went on to complete the Samara Heat Engineering Technikum.
Beginning in 1932, Sholomovich worked for three years as a photojournalist for the local newspaper Volzhskaya Kommuna. David then moved to Moscow, where he began to study at the Faculty of Camera Operators of the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, from which he graduated in 1939. He went on to work at the Rostov Documentary Film Studio.
Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, David Sholomovich was called up to serve in the Red Army and dispatched to the front lines as a cameraman in a film unit.
In 1942, Sholomovich was awarded the Stalin Prize for his camera work in the prewar Soviet documentary film Day of the New World (1940).
In the course of the war, David Sholomovich was active on the Southern, Southwestern, Transcaucasian, Black Sea, 2nd Belorussian, and 1st Ukrainian Fronts. His work would occasionally put him in grave danger. Mark Troyanovsky writes about an incident that took place near Rostov in summer 1942: "Sholomovich – first alone, and then together with Kotlyarenko – barely managed to break out of the enemy encirclement, and he was able to leave the unit in the field at the very last moment, following the orders of his superiors. While he was there, he also carried out his intelligence assignment" (V. P. Mikhailov and F. I. Fomin (eds.), The Price of a Frame. Moscow: Kanon+, 2010. p. 211). Sholomovich went on to take part in 35 combat missions of bomber regiments. He flew on various types of Soviet bombers; on one occasion, he even got to fly on an American Boston-3. His itinerary over the war's various fronts can be reconstructed from the titles of the movies that incorporated his footage: For Our Native Donbas, The Caucasus, The Battle for Sevastopol, The Liberation of Soviet Belorussia, The Victory in Right-Bank Ukraine, In East Prussia, In Pomerania.
In summer 1943 in Krasnodar Krai, David Sholomovich flew repeatedly on filming assignments with the famous Soviet pilot Vasily Emelianenko, who would later be awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Footage filmed by Sholomovich was incorporated into the movies The Wings of the People (1943) and Flying Fortresses. At the time, he was a member of a team of camera operators, led by Mark Troyanovsky, who filmed the investigative movie The Krasnodar Trial, depicting the first trial of Nazi collaborators in the USSR.
During the war, the authorities were reluctant to decorate servicemen from the film industry. It was commonly held that the filming may have taken place in more comfortable conditions (e.g., in the Soviet interior). Nevertheless, Engineer-Major David Sholomovich was decorated for his work as a military cameraman, being awarded the Orders of the Red Banner and the Red Star, two Orders of the Patriotic War (2nd Class), and some medals.
After the end of the war, David Sholomovich returned to Moscow and began to work as a photojournalist at the Soviet Information Bureau. In 1947, he became a first-category cameraman at the Central Studio for Documentary Film in Moscow. During his last years, he worked as a photojournalist at the Novosti Press Agency, which had been established on the basis of the Soviet Information Bureau in 1961.
David Sholomovich died in Moscow in 1965.
In 2015, a memorial stone was unveiled in Rostov-on-Don, commemorating the military camera operators of the Rostov Film Studio. David Sholomovich's last name is engraved upon this monument.
