Accusations that he had published unverified reports from amateur proletarian journalists known as rabkor led to his demotion from membership in the Communist Party and dismissal from his job as editor.

In 1923, Ignatovich made his first photo report: a snapshot of writer Mikhail Zoshchenko buying apples, taken with a pocket Kodak camera at the editorial office of Smekhach.

In 1925, he was restored to the ranks of the Communist Party and returned to Moscow, where he continued to work as an editor and soon joined the prominent newspaper Bednota as a press photographer, covering rural life, the peasantry, and industrial developments.

[8] In 1927, he participated in the photography exhibition of the Society of Friends of Soviet Cinema (Obshestvo Druzey Sovetskogo Kino - ODSK, Moscow), through which he met Alexander Rodchenko.

He also participated in the creation of one of the first sound films, Olympiad of Art, and made an extensive series of aerial surveys of Leningrad from an R-5 reconnaissance plane for a special issue of USSR in Construction.

Ignatovich served as a military photographer on the Eastern Front during World War II, working for the newspaper Boevoe Znamia.

He rode on horseback, reporting on a range of topics – including sapper squads, cavalry, snipers, scouts, front-line barbers, and field kitchens – in a variety of forms, such as chronicles, vignettes, genre scenes, and group and personal portraits.

In the 1950s he worked as a photographer for Ogonyok, as well as for the publishing houses Pravda, Izogiz, Stroiizdat, and Zhurnal mod, and led technical workshops at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV), where he set up a laboratory for color photography.

The last years of Ignatovich's life were spent in his communal apartment on Lenin Prospect, where young photographers would often visit to present their work and to learn from the old master.

Assessing his legacy after his death, the writer and historian of photography Valeriy Stigneev wrote, "He worked a frame like a sculptor, shearing off anything superfluous, and brought it to life like a movie.

On this great, fast-moving wave of art rose Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Deineka, El Lissitsky, and others.