Roman Vishniac

thumb|Roman Vishniac in 1977 Roman Vishniac (August 19, 1897 – January 22, 1990) was a renowned Russian-American photographer of poor Jews in Eastern European ghettos in the 1930s. Quotes These are the faces of children I embraced and kissed and loved. I cannot imagine that they are dead, that none would survive... A million and a half children among the six million... But this I knew... I wanted to save their faces, not their ashes. Mitgang, Herbert (Oct. 2, 1983). Testament to a Lost People. New York Times Magazine. pg 47. I read the first edition of 'Mein Kampf' when it came out in 1923 and even then I knew Hitler meant what he said. I knew the history of anti-Semitism going back for centuries, and I knew all about pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. When I grew up and whent to school in Moscow, I experienced anti-Semitism and the restrictions on where Jews could live and work. Hitler systemized anti-Semitism. Pogroms are my business... Oh yes, I could be a professor of anti-Semitism. Testament to a Lost People Even before the concentration camps, I felt it was my duty to my ancestors to preserve a world which might cease to exist. Testament to a Lost People Concentration camp money... It was a German sadism that invented it. Can you do anything with it? Yes, you can cry. Testament to a Lost People The Jews of the shtetls that Tolstoy remembered were saints... the people I photographed were saints. So now, in 1983, I tell the world: When you learn about Goethe, don't forget to study the Holocaust, too. Testament to a Lost People ...can you call a farm with a dozen geese a farm? Still, it was a little better for the Jews in Czechoslovakia. There were only two pogroms there. What's two pogroms? Testament to a Lost People Nature, God, or whatever you want to call the creator of the universe comes through the microscope clearly and strongly ICP Library of Photographers. Roman Vishniac. Grossman Publishers, New York. 1974. pg 42. The purpose of photography is the transmission of a visualized sector of life through the medium of the camera into a mental process that starts with the photographer's thinking about the subject he photographs and is continued in the mind of the spectator. Deschin, Jacob. "Nature as it is". New York Times (1857-Current file); Feb 3, 1952; Proquest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2002) pg. X14 You can't teach biology with a bottle containing dead animals and organisms. Shepard, Richard F. "Roman Vishniac, 92, a Biologist And Photographer of Jews, Dies". New York Times (1859-Current file); Jan 23, 1990; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1951 - 2002) pg. D23. New York Times Magazine 0362-4331 Newhouse Alana A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac The New York Times Magazine 2010-04-13 2010-03-29 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04shtetl-t.html [The Jews who roamed through Moscow looking for work] had a special kind of face ... a special kind of whisper and a special kind of footstep ... They were like hunted animals. My friends assured me that Hitler’s talk was sheer bombast,” Vishniac said in 1955. “But I replied that he would not hesitate to exterminate those people when he got around to it. And who was there to defend them? I knew I could be of little help, but I decided that, as a Jew, it was my duty to my ancestors, who grew up among the very people who were being threatened, to preserve — in pictures, at least — a world that might soon cease to exist. About Vishniac Vishniac came back from his trips... with a collection of photographs that has become an important historical document, for it gives us a last minute look at the human beings he photographed just before the fury of the Nazi brutality exterminated them. Vishniac took with him on this self-imposed assignment... a rare depth of understanding and a native son's warmth and love for his people. ~ Edward Steichen, ex-director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, in the 1950s. Testament to a Lost People [his scientific accomplishments] were overshadowed by the photographs he took of Jews in prewar Eastern Europe and in Nazi Berlin. -- Shepard, Richard "Roman Vishniac, 92, a Biologist And Photographer of Jews, Dies" Those images have proved to be an extraordinary record, made with forebodings of misfortune, that bring alive the flavor of the shtetl, of a Jewish peasant tending geese in the Carpathian Mountains, of tumbledown shacks in the Jewish quarter of Lublin, Poland, of Jewish patriarchs, in long caftans and wearing the furry hat called a shtreimel, trudging through the snow. -- Shepard, Richard "Roman Vishniac, 92, a Biologist And Photographer of Jews, Dies" I met him in 1966, and discovered how undiscovered he was. -- Cornell Capa "Roman Vishniac, 92, a Biologist And Photographer of Jews, Dies" [His photography was a] guiding force for visual interpretation [of Schindler's List]. Indiana University Press 0253210984, 9780253210982 Loshitzky Yosefa Spielberg's Holocaust 1997 166 New York Times Magazine 0362-4331 Newhouse Alana A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac The New York Times Magazine 2010-04-13 2010-03-29 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04shtetl-t.html [Roman Vishniac is] the official mortuary photographer of Eastern European Jewry. -- Leon Wieseltier, editor of The New Republic “No one who hasn’t tried it can comprehend the careful planning, the diabolical perseverance and the incredible skill it takes to obtain the [photomicroscopic] results he gets,” the magazine quoted Philippe Halsman, former president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, as saying of Vishniac. “The man is a special kind of genius.” In addition to his charisma and obvious talents, he was also known to possess what Howard Greenberg, Vishniac’s longtime gallerist, identified as “one of the bigger egos on the planet.” Category:Biologists from the United States Category:Photographers from the United States Category:Biologists from Russia Category:1897 births Category:1990 deaths