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Roman Vishniac

(St. Petersburg, Russia, 1897 - 1990, New York, New York)

North America, American

Roman Vishniac is best known for creating a photographic record of Eastern European Jewish communities just before the Holocaust; he was also a biologist and a pioneer of photomicroscopy. Raised in Moscow by affluent Jewish parents, Vishniac studied zoology and biology there. He immigrated to Berlin in 1920 following the Bolshevik Revolution and began experimenting with street photography as an amateur. The rise of Nazis to power and their oppression of Jews became a focus of his work. In 1935, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee commissioned Vishniac to document impoverished Eastern European Jewish communities—this body of work became his most known. Vishniac moved to New York in 1941 where he opened a portrait studio to support himself while also working to photograph microscopic subjects. Post-war awareness of his work is largely due to his friendship with Cornell Capa, founder of the International Center of Photography, where Vishniac’s archive now resides. Artwork Summary (125 words): Roman Vishniac is best known for creating a photographic record of Eastern European Jewish communities just before the Holocaust. Living in Berlin, Vishniac witnessed the rise of Nazis to power and their oppression of Jews became a focus of his photographs. In 1935, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a relief organization, commissioned Vishniac to document impoverished Jewish towns in Europe, particularly in Poland but also Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and Ukraine. The four-year project produced a widely distributed group of images that highlight poor but deeply pious orthodox Jews living in shtetls, small towns. Recent scholarship recognizes that Vishniac’s photographs by no means record the full range of European Jewish life that abruptly ended at the close of the 1930s. However, his emotive images of people and places lost to human and political brutality remain as a final record of a particular way of life. Importance / How Fits in to Artist’s Oeuvre / Appropriateness to Collection (if comments in addition to last question): Roman Vishniac’s photographs complement the AAM collection’s strength in documentary photography, offering both aesthetic and historical value.

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