Roman Vishniac (; ; August 19, 1897 – January 22, 1990) was a Russian-American photographer, best known for capturing on film the culture of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. A major archive of his work was housed at the International Center of Photography until 2018, when Vishniac's daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, donated it to The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California, Berkeley. Clary, David C. (2024). Walter Kohn: From Kindertransport and Internment to DFT and the Nobel Prize. World Scientific Publishing.
Vishniac was a versatile photographer, an accomplished biologist, an art collector and teacher of art history. He also made significant scientific contributions to photomicroscopy and time-lapse photography. Vishniac was very interested in history, especially that of his ancestors, and strongly attached to his Jewish roots; he was a Zionist later in life.ICP Library of Photographers. Roman Vishniac. Grossman Publishers, New York. 1974.
Roman Vishniac won international acclaim for his photos of shtetlach and Jewish ghettos, celebrity portraits, and microscopic biology. His book A Vanished World, published in 1983, made him famous and is one of the most detailed pictorial documentations of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Vishniac was also remembered for his humanism and respect for life, sentiments that can be seen in all aspects of his work.
In 2013, Vishniac's daughter Mara (Vishniac) Kohn donated to the International Center of Photography the images and accompanying documents comprising ICP's "Roman Vishniac Rediscovered" traveling exhibition.
In October 2018, Kohn donated the Vishniac archive of an estimated 30,000 items, including photo negatives, prints, documents and other memorabilia that had been housed at ICP to The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, a unit of the University of California at Berkeley's library system.
Biography Early life Vishniac was born in his grandparents' dacha outside Saint Petersburg, in the town of Pavlovsk, and grew up in Moscow.Kohn, Mara Vishniac, Biographical Note (1992). To Give them Light: The Legacy of Roman Vishniac. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. . To live in this city was a right granted to few Jews but the Vishniac family lived there because Solomon Vishniac, Roman's father, was a wealthy manufacturer of umbrellas, and his mother, Manya, was the daughter of affluent diamond dealers. Vishniac also had a sister, Katja.Jüdisches Museum Berlin (2005). Roman Vishniac's Berlin. Editors: Mara Vishniac Kohn, James Howard Fraser and Aubrey Pomerance. Published by Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung. During the summer months, the Vishniac family left Moscow, as it became uncomfortably hot, and they retreated to a dacha a few miles outside the city.
As a child, Vishniac was fascinated by biology and photography, and his room was filled with "plants, insects, fish and small animals".Vishniac, Roman. The Concerns of Roman Vishhniac: Man, Nature and Science. On his seventh birthday, he got a microscope from his grandmother, to which he promptly hooked up a camera, and by which he photographed the muscles in a cockroach's leg at 150 times magnification. Young Vishniac used this microscope extensively, viewing and photographing everything he could find, from dead insects to animal scales, to pollen and protozoa.
Until the age of ten, Vishniac was homeschooled; from ten to seventeen, he attended a private school at which he earned a gold medal for scholarship."Roman Vishniac". Current Biography (1967). Beginning in 1914, he spent six years at the Shanyavsky Moscow City People's University (now Russian State University for the Humanities) in Moscow. At the institute he studied zoology. As a graduate student, he worked with prestigious biologist Nikolai Koltzoff, experimenting with inducing metamorphosis in axolotl, a species of aquatic salamander. While his experiments were a success, Vishniac was not able to publish a paper detailing his findings due to the chaos in Russia and his results were eventually independently duplicated. In spite of this, he went on to take a three-year course in medicine.
Berlin In 1918, Vishniac's immediate family moved to Berlin because of anti-Semitism spurred by uprisings against the Bolsheviks. Roman followed them and, shortly after arriving, married Luta (Leah) Bagg, who gave birth to two children, Mara and Wolf.Kohn, Mara Vishniac. A Photographer of a Vanished World and his Family. HIAS. Accessed January 1, 2006. In his free time, he studied Far Eastern Art at the University of Berlin. Vishniac researched endocrinology and optics, and did some photography (see right). In Berlin he often gave lectures on naturalism.
In 1935, as anti-Semitism was growing in Germany, Vishniac was commissioned by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Central Europe to photograph Jewish communities in Eastern Europe as part of a fund-raising drive to help support these poor communities. Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Maya Benton from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Vishniac developed and printed these pictures in his darkroom in his Berlin apartment. Further trips to Eastern Europe were undertaken between 1935 and 1938, again at the behest of the JDC. Vishniac used both a Leica and a Rolleiflex camera in his photography. In 1939, his wife and children moved to Sweden to stay with Luta's parents, away from hostile Germany. He met his parents in Nice that summer.
Vishniac traveled to Paris in late summer 1940, and was arrested by Marshal Pétain's police and interned at Camp du Ruchard, a deportation camp in Indre-et-Loire. This occurred because Latvia, of which he was a citizen, had been subsumed into the Soviet Union and Vishniac was considered a "stateless person". After three months, as a result of his wife's efforts and aid from the JDC, he obtained a visa that allowed him to escape via Lisbon to the U.S. with his family. His father stayed behind and spent the war hidden in France; his mother died from cancer in 1941 while still in Nice.Jewish Museum Berlin (2005). Special Exhibition: Roman Vishniac's Berlin . Accessed February 14, 2012
New York
The Vishniac family fled from Lisbon to New York City in 1940, arriving on New Year's Eve. Vishniac tried to get a job but failed: "For me, it was a time of distraction and fear." He was multilingual, speaking at least German, Russian and Yiddish, but he could not yet speak any English and thus had a difficult time.Weiner, Jonathan (circa 1981). "Field of Vision". Moment. pg 37. He managed to do some portraiture work with mostly foreign clients; but business was poor. It was during this time, in 1942, that he took one of his most celebrated portraits, that of Albert Einstein. He arrived at Einstein's home in Princeton, New Jersey, getting into the scientist's study with the ruse of bringing regards from mutual friends in Europe, and photographed him while the scientist was not paying attention to him, occupied in thought. Einstein later called this portrait his favourite.
In 1946, Vishniac divorced Luta, and the next year he married Edith Ernst, an old family friend. A few years later, he gave up portraiture and went on to do freelance work in the field of photomicroscopy.
Once in the United States, Vishniac tried desperately to earn sympathy for impoverished Jews in Eastern Europe. When his work was exhibited at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1943,"Studies in Misery Shown". New York Times February 2, 1943; ProQuest Historical Newspapers pg. 21. he wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt (First Lady at the time), asking her to visit the exhibit, but she did not. He also sent some of his photographs to the President, for which he was politely thanked.Edited by Kohn, Mara Vishniac and Flacks, Miriam Hartman. Roman Vishniac: Children of a Vanished World. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.
Of the 16,000 photographs taken in Eastern Europe by Vishniac, only 2,000 reached America.UCSB Arts & Lectures (2000). Work of photographer Roman Vishniac remembered in special illustrated program at UCSB. Accessed October 18, 2005. Most of these negatives were carefully hidden by Vishniac and his family; others were smuggled in by Vishniac's good friend Walter Bierer through Cuba. In the photographer's own words,
Later life
Even when he grew older, Vishniac was very active. In 1957, he was appointed research associate at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and in 1961 was promoted to "professor of biological education". In his seventies and eighties, Vishniac became "Chevron Professor of Creativity" at Pratt Institute (where he taught courses on topics such as the philosophy of photography). During this time he lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife Edith, teaching, photographing, reading and collecting artifacts.Mitgang, Herbert (October 2, 1983). "Testament to a Lost People". New York Times Magazine. pg 47. Items in his collection included a 14th-century Buddha, Chinese tapestries, Japanese swords, various antique microscopes, valued old maps and venerable books.Vogt, Richard. Dr. Vishniac and the Beauty of the Real. Accessed December 9, 2005. According to the site, the text originally "appeared in Kodak International Review – No. 9". Archived copy at the Library of Congress (November 9, 2001). He taught Oriental and Russian art, general philosophy and religion in science, specifically Jewish topics, ecology, numismatics, photography and general science at City University of New York, Case Western Reserve University and at various other institutions.
During his life, Vishniac was the subject and creator of many films and documentaries; the most celebrated of which was the Living Biology series. This consisted of seven films on cell biology; organs and systems; embryology; evolution; genetics; ecology; botany; the animal world; and the microbial world. It was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Vishniac received Honorary Doctoral degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design, Columbia College of Art and the California College of Art,Ciano, Bob. The Vanished World: A limited edition portfolio. Roslyn Heights, NY: Witkin-Berley, 1977. before his death from colon cancer on January 22, 1990.
Photography
In Central and Eastern Europe
1935–1939 Vishniac is best known for his dramatic photographs of poor and pious Jews in cities and shtetlach of Eastern Europe. He was commissioned to take these pictures by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) as part of a fundraising initiative, but Vishniac had a personal interest in this subject matter. He traveled back and forth from Berlin to the ghettos of Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Lithuania between 1935 and 1938 as well as working for the JDC.
While touring Europe, Vishniac posed as a traveling fabric salesman, seeking aid where he could and bribing anyone who got in his way.Murray, Schumach. "Vishniac's Lost World Of the Jews". New York Times November 25, 1983; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851–2002) pg. C1. During his touring of Eastern Europe (1935–1939), he was often arrested by police for taking these pictures, sometimes because he was thought to be spying. Later, when published, these photographs made him popular enough for his work to be showcased as one-man shows at Columbia University, the Jewish Museum in New York, the International Center of Photography and other such institutions.