Porter Nat Gutman, Warsaw
Roman Vishniac
1935–1938
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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.
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