Roman Vishniac's art photography exhibition of Berlin and eastern Europe

A Berlin street, 1933 

See swastika flag over the door on left

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered was the first UK retro­sp­ective of this photographer. Curated by U.S photography scholar Maya Benton, and spread across two London sites: the Photo­graphers’ Gallery and the Jewish Museum, the exhibition ended in Feb 2019. Many of his most iconic works from the Roman Vishniac Archive at the International Center of Photography NY were included.

Roman Vishniac (1897–1990) was born to a Jewish family in a small Russian town, then his parents moved to Moscow. The parents must have been wealthy or influential, be­cause Jews were normally not allowed outside the Pale of Settle­ment. As a child Roman received a camera and a microscope which began his love of photography and science.

After the Russian Revolution, Roman and his young wife Luta arrived in Berlin via Moscow and Riga. There Vishniac was reunited with his wealthy parents, who had already left Russia, and he and Luta were married again in a proper Jewish ceremony. The story of their trip westward was part of Vishniac’s amazing life, which was lived out against Europe’s turbulent early-to-mid C20th history.

Thus their new life began in Berlin,  a city that Vish­niac called “a living whole … the centre of western Europe”.  There Vishniac joined some of  the many flourishing cam­era clubs. Inspired by the cosmopolitanism and rich cultural exper­imentation in Berlin, Vishniac used photographs to doc­ument his surroundings. This early body of work reflected the infl­uence of European modernism - his framing, sharp angles and dramatic use of light and shade.

In Berlin, his interest in street photography and social docum­entary arose, just as the nation was experiencing huge political changes. His images showed an unsettling visual foreboding of the growing signs of oppression, loss of rights for Jews, rise of Nazism in Ger­many, insidious propaganda swastika flags and military parades. By the mid 1930s, he was catching the daily ebb and flow of the German capital, his outsider’s eye locating the details that told an increasingly ominous story.

Berlin was a society in which ordinary life was becoming more ex­treme before Nazi rule. Social and political docum­ent­ation quickly became a focal point of his work and drew the att­ention of organisations wanting to raise awareness and support for the Jewish population. In 1935, Vishniac was commissioned by JDC, the large Jewish relief organisation American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, to photo­graph impoverished Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. In fact he did dozens of trips to eastern Europe over 4 years, to Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Latvia. These images were intended to support relief efforts, used in fund­raising campaigns for an American audience.

Taken from Vishniac’s photo archives, this London exhibition was a new presentation. Since the publication A Vanished World: Jewish Cities, Jewish People in 1947, he's been primarily known for his documentation of life and culture in the Jewish shtetls of East Europe in 1935-9, pre-Holocaust. His photographs almost immediately became part of the collective memory of what had been destroyed. I received this book as a bat mitzvah present back in the early 1960s, as did many of my schoolfriends.

German Jews routinely had their businesses boycotted, were banned from many public places and were expelled from Aryanised schools. They were also being eased out from practising law, medic­ine and teaching, among many other loss of civil lib­erties. Vishniac recorded this painful new reality with im­ages showing Jewish soup kitchens, schools and hospitals, immigr­ation offices and Zionist agrarian training camps. His photos tracked the speed with which Berlin changed from an open, intel­l­ectual society to one where militarism and fascism were closing in.

 

A Polish school for Jewish boys, 1936

A Polish couple shopping, 1938 

When the war broke out a few years later, his photos served urgent refugee efforts. Vishniac left Europe and arrived in New York with his fam­ily in late 1941. He continued to record the impact of WW2 in the USA, focusing on the arrival of Jewish refugees and other immigrants to the USA. In 1947 he returned home to document refugees and relief efforts in Jewish Displaced Persons camps, and to witness the ruins of his adopted hometown, Berlin. Post-war, Vishniac’s images became the most comprehensive photographic record of a world that had disappeared. 

The London retrospective presented a timely reappraisal of Vishniac’s vast photographic legacy. It brought together his complete works, including recently discovered vintage prints, rare and lost film footage from the early 1920s on, contact sheets, personal correspondence, original magazine publications and newly created exhibition prints. 

Berlin Street, 1933

See Books & Boots for the exhibition section that I barely mentioned: Immigrants, refugees and New York Jewish community. Read Terror in focus: the photographer who captured the rise of Nazism by Sean O’Hagan.