USA: Rare and unpublished photos from the four decades of Roman Vishniac's career show rare images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before War War II

Record ID: 837157

  • Title: USA: Rare and unpublished photos from the four decades of Roman Vishniac's career show rare images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before War War II
  • Date: 18th January 2013
  • Summary: PHOTO OF VISHNIAC IN HIS LAB WORKING ON MICROPHOTOSCOPY
  • Embargoed: 2nd February 2013 12:00
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  • Location: Usa
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  • Country: USA
  • Topics: Arts,History
  • Reuters ID: LVA9YD387C2RIAQH5P3I69NE7M22
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  • Story Text: The International Center for Photography opened a new exhibition on famed Jewish photographer Roman Vishniac on Thursday (January 17).
    The installation entitled "Roman Vishniac, Rediscovered" combines more than 200 photos - most never before published - with letters, correspondence, magazine clippings and other ephemera from Vishniac's personal collection to present the artist's 40 years of work.

    "The negatives were only digitized this summer, and this is really a first pass introduction to this huge archive. And it's the tip of the iceberg. Each of these bodies of work could be a whole exhibition quite easily," explained Adjunct Curator Maya Benton.
    Benton spent ten summers with Vishniac's daughter Mara Vishniac Kuhn who received her father's collection when he passed away in 1990, sorting through the mostly uncatalogued negatives to create the exhibit.
    The installation follows Vishniac's life as the Russian-Jew left his revolutionary home for Weimar Germany and first picks up the camera capturing street scenes as an amateur. A whole room shows Berlin, his adopted home, in the 1930s as Hitler and the Nazis rise to power and the impact that their anti-Semitic laws had on the Jewish communities.
    It was from this work that Vishniac earned a commission from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to photograph impoverished Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. The collection, shot from 1935 to 1938, became the most widely recognized and reproduced photographic record of European Jews between the two World Wars, before it vanished as a result of World War II and comprises the bulk of the exhibit.

    "My goal for this show was to really do a first pass introduction to this massive archive that will ultimately be publicly accessible - every single piece, every single negative, every contact sheet, every print has been digitized. And everything is going online in a shared digital database with the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC," said Benton.
    Benton calls the collaboration with the Holocaust Museum the first example of a secular fine arts museum and a history museum digitally sharing an entire archive as they try to identify with the help of survivors and their families the people and scenes that Vishniac captured.
    However, much of the photographer's output over four decades, including the JDC collection for which he earned his reputation, remained unpublished during his lifetime.
    As Benton describes, he was a very versatile artists influenced by the artistic movements of the period. During the same time that he captured Jews living in the Pale of Settlement, he would also photograph iconic pre-War French scenes in Paris and the Riviera, which are found in another room of the exhibit.
    In the same room are found photos from 1939 of a Jewish Agrarian camp in the Netherlands that clearly show a Russian Constructivist influence as Vishniac shows young European Jews who are waiting for their emigration paperwork learning how to work on a farm.

    "I think that his known work will be a great surprise. And when I wrote 'rediscovered' as the title, it was because I think even in the Jewish community where they think they know Vishniac, it will be a great rediscovery. And for a lot of people who didn't know about Vishniac, it'll be the discovery of a really great photographer of the 20th Century, and there aren't that many of those where you think 'where did this guy come from?' and 'how did we not know about him?'" describes Benton of the work.
    The final rooms of the exhibition follow the photographer to the U.S. where he and his children arrived on New Year's Day 1941. Vishniac would go on the capture the 'Faces of War' in his new home in a portfolio that the Guggenheim rejected. The pictures, never before seen, show the impact of wartime rationing, the impact of women joining the labor force in huge numbers, and the influx of military personal on R&R in the city.
    Not to be missed are the never before images of Berlin in 1947 when Vishniac returned to his adopted home to photograph the impact of the War and the resettlement of Europe's Jewish population.
    Vishniac would eventually set up a portrait studio in New York's Upper West Side and spend his time after the War frequenting integrated jazz clubs at night and taking photos of Jewish luminaries such as Albert Einstein and Marc Chagall. Vishniac also spent plenty of time following Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York as followed them as they restarted their lives.
    Eventually, Vishniac moved back to his scientific training and spent the latter part of his life and career pioneering the field of microphotoscopy - taking a photograph through a magnifying lens. The final room of the exhibition features a slideshow of over 100 color transparencies by Vishniac.

    "I think in the Jewish world there will be this reappraisal and I think that in the photo world there'll be a big kind of excitement and surprise about discovering a great modernist and social documentarian," Benton surmised.
    Vishniac's daughter Mara, now 82, agrees with the assessment.

    "I must say I have a wider view of my father's work right now than I had before," she said after seeing much of her father's work for the first time.
    The ICP will feature the exhibit, Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, through May 5.
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