Creator Bio
Roman Vishniac
1897–1990
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.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
Porter Nat Gutman, Warsaw
Vishniac’s photographs of Jews in Eastern Europe, which were among the last to document these communities before their destruction in the Holocaust, have become iconic images. The best known of them…