Berlin street scene

Born in Russia in 1897, Roman Vishniac was a biologist by training, having earned a doctorate in zoology and a medical degree from Moscow universities and a doctorate in Oriental art from the University of Berlin. For many years he was prevented from working in any of those fields because of war, revolution and political persecution. He instead pursued a career in microphotography, the photographing of insects, cells, plankton and other small organisms. His images in this area regularly appeared in Life magazine. From 1935 to 1938, Vishniac explored on foot the cities and villages of Eastern Europe, recording life in the Jewish shtetlekh (villages) of Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania, communities that even then seemed threatened by routine change as much as by violence and extermination. Using a hidden camera and working under difficult circumstances that included evading the police and also Nazis, he was able to take thousands of photographs. Before he finished the tour, he had been jailed eleven times and placed in a concentration camp in Vichy France. Roman Vishniac died in 1990.