Roman Vishniac was the principal photographer of pre-war Jewish life in eastern Europe. Between 1935 and 1938 he travelled across Poland, Romania, the Carpathian Ruthenia and the Soviet Union, photographing the substantial Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities of the small towns and the urban quarters that were destroyed in the Holocaust seven to ten years later. The photographs he produced, around 16,000 negatives of which around 2,000 survived the war, are the most substantial single visual record of the world that was killed.
Vishniac before 1935
Vishniac was born in 1897 in Pavlovsk, near St Petersburg, into a substantial Jewish industrialist family. He had been trained in zoology and biology at Shanyavsky University in Moscow and had been an early adopter of microphotography and time-lapse cinematography for biological subjects. The 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war had displaced his family; they had moved to Berlin in 1920, where Vishniac established himself as a portrait photographer to the Berlin Jewish bourgeoisie through the 1920s and early 1930s. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the subsequent dispossession of German Jewry shifted his work substantially: from 1933 he began documenting the systematic stripping of rights from German Jews, photographing the Berlin Jewish street life, the closed shops, the public humiliations.
The Eastern European project
The commission for the Eastern European photographic project came in 1935 from the American Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint), the principal American Jewish overseas relief organisation. The Joint had identified the substantial poverty of the eastern European Jewish communities as a fundraising priority and wanted documentary photographs that could be used in American Jewish fundraising campaigns. The brief was specific: photograph the poorest of the eastern European communities so that American Jews would understand what was being asked of their philanthropy.
Vishniac’s interpretation of the brief was substantially broader than the Joint had requested. Between 1935 and 1938 he conducted what amounted to a systematic visual survey of the small-town and urban Yiddish-speaking Jewish life of central and eastern Europe. He travelled with substantially more equipment than was necessary for the Joint’s purposes, conducted his work without the kind of formal portrait setup that would have produced more conventional fundraising imagery, and photographed continuously through long days in conditions where the cameras of the period were difficult to operate. The substantial majority of the surviving images are of working-class and poor Jewish life: the cobblers, the tailors, the heders (religious schools for young children), the marketplaces, the Yiddish-speaking children, the elderly studying in the small synagogues. There is also substantial material on the Hasidic communities, on the rabbinic seminaries of Vilna and Mir, and on the Jewish quarters of Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków and the smaller Polish towns.
What survived
Vishniac escaped from German-occupied France in 1940 and reached the United States in early 1941. He brought with him, sewn into the linings of his clothes and concealed in the lining of a suitcase, around 2,000 of the original 16,000 negatives. The remainder were lost to the war. The surviving images were published in two principal collections: Polish Jews in 1947, a small book with 31 photographs published by Schocken; and A Vanished World in 1983, a much larger collection with around 180 photographs published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, edited substantially by Vishniac himself in his old age and presented as the definitive record of the pre-war world.
The reception and the controversy
The Vishniac images became, in the post-war period, the principal visual reference for the popular American and British understanding of pre-war eastern European Jewish life. The images appeared in textbooks, in museum exhibitions, in documentary films, in the introductory chapters of standard Holocaust histories. The composition of the images (substantial use of low angles, the close framing of faces, the deliberate use of shadow to emphasise religious and traditional elements) shaped the popular visual vocabulary of pre-war Jewish life for a generation.
The controversy that emerged in the 2000s, principally in the work of Maya Benton at the International Center of Photography in New York, was that Vishniac had substantially shaped the surviving record through his own selection and editing. The 16,000 original negatives had included substantial material on the assimilated, secular and middle-class Jewish communities of inter-war eastern Europe; Vishniac’s post-war presentation had emphasised the traditional, religious and impoverished communities to the substantial exclusion of the others. The picture of pre-war eastern European Jewish life that the Vishniac images had built up in the popular Western imagination was therefore narrower than the underlying photographic record warranted. The Benton-led re-examination of the full surviving archive, presented in the 2013 ICP exhibition Roman Vishniac Rediscovered and the accompanying book, made substantial portions of the wider archive publicly available for the first time.
What the work did and continues to do
The Vishniac archive remains the most substantial single visual record of pre-war eastern European Jewish life. The historiographical correction does not overturn the underlying documentary value of what was photographed; it adjusts the picture of what the photographer had actually photographed. The images themselves continue to be used in substantial Holocaust-education and museum contexts. The full Vishniac archive is now held at the International Center of Photography in New York and is available substantially online. The substantial body of images that Vishniac had not selected for his own post-war presentation is now part of the wider documentary record that the historians draw on.
Vishniac himself died in New York in 1990 at the age of ninety-two. He had continued to work as a portrait photographer and as a microphotographer of biological subjects through the post-war decades; the eastern European project remained the work for which he had been principally known.
See also
Sources
- Roman Vishniac, A Vanished World, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983
- Roman Vishniac, Polish Jews: A Pictorial Record, Schocken Books, 1947
- Maya Benton (ed), Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, DelMonico Books / Prestel for the International Center of Photography, 2015
- Mara Vishniac Kohn (ed), Children of a Vanished World, University of California Press, 1999 (Vishniac’s daughter’s curated selection)
- Alana Newhouse, “A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac”, The New York Times Magazine, 4 April 2010 (the article that initiated the wider re-examination)
- Eva Hoffman, Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews, Houghton Mifflin, 1997 (broader context)
- International Center of Photography, Vishniac Archive, https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/roman-vishniac
- Magnum Photos, Vishniac estate materials, https://www.magnumphotos.com