Roman Vishniac Rediscovered,
an exhibit at the Photographers’ Gallery & the Jewish Museum, London, October 26, 2018–February 24, 2019.
After the last gifts had been opened on his seventh birthday, the young Roman Vishniac took the microscope and camera he had received and hastily affixed one to the other before capturing his first-ever photograph: a study of the segments and spines of a cockroach leg at 150x magnification. Like an overture introducing a symphonic theme, this single moment—unbeknownst to the little boy fiddling now with the focus knobs, now with the aperture—brought together the twin leitmotifs that would play themselves out through the end of his life.
The son of an umbrella magnate and a diamond heiress, Vishniac grew up in Moscow at a time when the tsarist government generally forbade Jews from residing within the city walls. Still, he was able to obtain a spot at one of Moscow’s universities, despite the strict Jewish quotas. In the zoology department of the Shanyavsky Institute, Vishniac immersed himself in recording the curious metamorphosis of the fan-gilled Mexican salamander known as the axolotl. But the turmoil of the October Revolution scuttled his plans to publish, and the flare-ups of antisemitism that coincided with the Bolsheviks’ rise pushed him and his family westward to Berlin. Faintly visible in the tender amateur snapshots Vishniac took while on his honeymoon with Luta Begg (whom he married shortly after moving to Germany in 1920) is an early intimation of the style for which he would soon become known when hobby turned into profession: an eye for capturing the soft moments of contemplation, and an interest, above all else, in the human figure.
If Vishniac’s departure from Russia caused him to lay aside his lab work, it also marked the beginning of a decades-spanning photographic career that forms the subject of Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, which came to London after having opened at New York’s International Center of Photography in 2013 and traveled nationally and internationally since then. Though celebrated during his lifetime, Vishniac only published some 250 photographs before his death. The exhibition, which draws from an archive of almost 50,000 objects encompassing not only photos but also contact sheets, scrapbooks, and never-before-seen video footage, therefore represents a major step forward for our understanding of the full breadth of Vishniac’s œuvre.
Such an understanding allows us to situate Vishniac—both in the nature of his project and the magnitude of his aesthetic achievement—squarely among the pantheon of the early twentieth century’s great social documentary photographers. As curator Maya Benton notes in an introductory video, at the same time as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans were journeying westward across America to document the ruination wrought by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, Vishniac’s own desire to capture the plight of Jews eking out an increasingly marginal existence in the shadow of fascism’s rise would push him and his camera east. And as with Lange and Evans, many of Vishniac’s most famous images feel like photography in the active voice—not merely observing but demanding a response.
Though the photos Vishniac took in Eastern Europe between 1935 and 1938 constitute the body of work for which he is best known, the early material showcased by the exhibition reveals that he possessed a high degree of emotional perceptiveness and aesthetic attunement even at the start of his career. Images that capture the interplay between human figures and Berlin’s modernist architecture, as in a photo of a window-washer captured from below through the diagonal slats of a ladder, foreshadow Vishniac’s later investigations of how the dimensions of a space—whether it be the cramped quarters of a Warsaw basement dwelling or the eerie openness of a post-war rubblescape—can convey the emotional states of the people within it. So, too, could Vishniac use his acute eye for geometry not merely for aesthetic ends but also for the purposes of social commentary. In the 1930s, Jews were discouraged and then banned from visiting Berlin’s famed Zoological Garden: a snapshot taken from inside the polar bear enclosure makes it appear that the vertical bars of the cage entrap not the animals but the humans who have come to view them. Though less carefully composed, Vishniac’s Berlin street photography from the Thirties is likewise an invaluable visual record of the ways in which fascism worked its way into German life beyond the mass spectacles of political rallies and public demonstrations. A swastika flag drapes carelessly out of a window, almost unnoticed, in one shot; in another, a shop display advertises cranium-measuring devices used by eugenicists. Here, with the eye of a microscopist, Vishniac captures the insidious way in which Nazi ideology manifested itself in the textures and rhythms of the quotidian while passers-by seemed to pay it no mind at all. By refusing to take such sights for granted, Vishniac’s images worked against the sense of normalizing invisibility that increased these objects’ power.
More familiar to fans of Vishniac than his German work is the Eastern European photography that made his reputation when he was alive. In interviews, Vishniac framed his expeditions to places like Lublin, Vilnius, and Galicia as a divinely sanctioned mission, a calling from God to capture the lyricism of hardscrabble shtetl life or the grinding struggles of urban poverty. Research by Benton, however, has revealed that his documentary surveys of Eastern European Jewry were instead commissioned by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Company (commonly abbreviated JDC), a relief organization working to raise awareness of the existential threat faced by these communities at the time. The remit of Vishniac’s contract, which asked him not to capture the whole scope of Jewish life but instead to focus on the destitute and the religious, helps explain the relatively narrow subject range of the few photographs Vishniac published during his lifetime—pictures that have caused some critics to label his work as excessively sentimental. In her curatorial decisions, Benton works hard to push back against this limited understanding of Vishniac’s output. Bright-eyed cheder students and dirty-faced children are well represented, but there are also scenes in which Vishniac permitted himself momentarily to lay aside his mandate and observe the beauty of what lay before him. In recently uncovered footage Vishniac took of Carpathian Jewish life, for instance, Orthodox men and women are shown not just praying or preparing for the Sabbath but in unadorned and un-romanticized everyday life: as goatherds, as plowmen, as ditch-diggers sloshing through muck. One of the great strengths of Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, then, is just how much broader a picture it gives both of Jewish life during the early twentieth century and of Vishniac’s attentions as an artist.
Benton’s research prior to the exhibition also sheds light on Vishniac’s frequent willingness to embroider his images with narratives that were based less on fact than on the exigencies of drama. She lays out the degree to which Vishniac’s photo captions (many of which were written years after the photos themselves were taken) often seem to contain at least accidental slips and at most deliberate fictions. Is the father-son pair so elegantly framed by a Mukachevo archway really heading to the religious school, or are they merely taking an afternoon stroll? Are the children who turn towards the camera expectantly really looking to see if the person in the doorway is their father bringing home the day’s only meal? Within the gallery space, contact sheets—annotated in red to select, reject, and crop—and mock-ups of never-realized photography books provide tangible insight into how Vishniac carefully shaped the stories that accreted around his work, challenging the notion that the documentary and the editorial exist at opposite ends of a spectrum. Of course, Vishniac is hardly the only photographer of his time to court controversy when it comes to the veracity of his work. (Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier comes to mind.) But now, observing the self-evident strength of his photos at a historical remove, it’s tempting to ask why he felt the need for falsehood in the first place.
After he relocated to the United States, the later years of Vishniac’s life saw a return to his earlier interest in biology. His pioneering work in photomicroscopy forms an extraordinary coda to what was already a highly accomplished career. A darkened, chapel-like room at the end of the exhibition contains a slideshow of his scientific images: tiger stripes of muscle fibers, cross-sectioned roots that loom as large as the sun, vitamins that shimmer like opalescent stained glass. (Unfortunately absent is one of my favorite Vishniac works, a portrait of his daughter captured through the prism of a firefly’s eye.) From the corner of the room comes Vishniac’s voice as he narrates a documentary with the endearing earnestness of a grade-school teacher. “Nothing living is simple,” he says. Indeed. Not his microscopic subjects, not his macroscopic ones, and certainly not Vishniac himself, with his complex braiding of truth with untruth, with his broad-ranging talent that encompassed far more than, until recently, he allowed the world to see.
Standing in that final room, watching as the slideshow transitioned to a Van Gogh whorl of orange and blue (an extreme close-up of human skin), suddenly I felt immeasurably moved, as though a curtain had been pulled back to reveal the worlds upon worlds within. Is this not, ultimately, the same spirit that animated Vishniac’s earlier work as well, with his eye for the interplay of form, his quest to make the unknown known? Latent in all of his photos is this desire to capture the unseen—either because it is beyond the capacity of human vision, or because it is at the point of vanishing—and to teach his viewers to attune their eyes to it. “In these color photographs,” the voice continued, “living creatures are forever preserved as I saw them originally.” Yet anyone who seeks to preserve must also accept the countervailing knowledge that those which they do not preserve, or do not preserve faithfully, will in all likelihood not survive. As I left the exhibition, my mind returned to the show’s first image, a photo of heavy-coated commuters silhouetted against the arched doorways of a train station. Sun streaks in; the light of other days throws the figures’ shadows towards us. But as for their faces, their features, the thoughts they would have guarded or revealed-—all of this is lost to us.
Erica X Eisen’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, The Guardian, AGNI, The New Inquiry, the LRB Blog, and elsewhere.
