Born into a wealthy, Russian-speaking family that settled in Berlin after the Bolshevik Revolution, the photographer Roman Vishniac traveled extensively in Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, photographing pious and impoverished Jews. The images he created, which were widely distributed in the postwar period, shaped popular perceptions of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. He came to America in 1940 and after the war worked extensively in photomicroscopy, building on his earlier training in biology, zoology, and endocrinology.
Georgi Zelma’s photograph of soldiers charging up Mamayev Hill with their guns at the ready became one of the iconic photographs of Soviet heroism in the battle of Stalingrad. What draws the eye…
In one of her early photography projects, Rovner took Polaroids of an abandoned Bedouin shack in the desert and reprinted them in different ways. Here the shack appears blurred, ghostly, as if seen…
Sheltered by a crimson awning,
All alone, his slaves dismissed,
A lord is bidding farewell fondly
To a black-browed odalisque.
“Sarah, houri of the prophet,
My sunshine, comfort, strength, delight…