Vanished World - Roman Vishniac

I recommend this book of photos of Jews from 35-38 in Germany and

Poland. Vishniac, a Jew himself, forsaw the eradication of the

culture (at least), and took it upon himself to capture candid images

of Jews in the Jewish Ghettos. Photography being relatively new, many

Jews had not yet resolved the distinction of graven image and

photograph. Consequently Vishniac often used a hidden camera, and

captured astonishing street photos of the culture. Naturally, photos

of every day scenes become more interesting with the passage of time,

but this book is full of fine street photography under any definition

of the term, and accomplished with picture-taking tools far more

primitive than we are all accustomed to. Many of you may be familiar

of his widely circulated "grandfather and granddaughter" photo, but

this fine photo rises only to average in comparison to the over 100

other photos in this book. Not only that, but it also is an example

of the potential value of craft we practice.

Vishniac's books are canonical and the photos transcend the medium, in my opinion. Supposedly the surviving photos from the ghettoes comprise about 20% of the exposures he made; the rest were destroyed by the Nazis.

 

He had a distinguished career in the US subsequent to the war, as a biologist and as a photographer. A superb portrait of Einstein by him hangs at my workplace.

I once spoke with someone in a bookstore who disparaged Vishniac's book as purposefully depicting Jewish life in that era as sordid. Their contention was that Jews were wealthy, and that the scenes depicted in this book were either non-Jews or entirely invented for the camera. This from an otherwise intelligent person. What books like this communicate to me then, is how the dangers of that era still exist in our current moment (Montaigne's insistance that good and evil are "consubstantial with our existence," i.e. evil is just as human as goodness, rather than goodness being normal and evil abnormal) and how necessary (still, perhaps continually) are free & open conversations about these dangers if we are to prevent future disasters.

Seeing the hand to mouth existence of the ghetto and rural Jews also explained why

so few could fight back. They lacked resources for even the most elementary means

of defense, such as ability to travel. Since religious Jews do not hunt, they probably

couldn't justify arms purely for defense and, after 1938, could not own arms legally

anyway,<p>

<img src="http://www.olegvolk.net/gallery/albums/bernsteins/

gertrude1943.sized.jpg" alt="Gertrude"><p>

<i>Gertrude, 1943</i>

<a href="http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/Shahn/exhibitiontour/index.html"> Ben Shahn </a> also has an extensive collection of photos of the lower east side. be sure to go to the data base and do a search on his name and leaf through the thumbnails....quite a nice collection....

Thanks John for bringing him up. I'vo owned the book for a number of years and it is everything you say.

"This from an otherwise intelligent person." You are being too kind. I have heard that statement before too...With apologies for digressing from the thread, anybody who makes statements like that is not intelligent, but more than likely has the veneer of intelligence. It is amazing how many folks out there MUST have something to hate, and how this type of hate is carried over from generation to generation.