Rediscovered and uncovered

By P.W. | NEW YORK

FLOWERS stencilled on the wall dance above the bed. Their lyricism poses a stark contrast to the frightened face of little Sara—wide-eyed, beautiful and poor. She sits engulfed by blankets, trying to keep warm. This image, taken in Warsaw in 1935, became one of the most widely reproduced works by Roman Vishniac, a Russian-born photographer who died in 1990, aged 92. He is now the subject of a well-deserved retrospective at the International Centre for Photography (ICP) in New York.

The ICP recently became the repository of the Vishniac archive of some 30,000 objects: negatives, prints, film footage, memorabilia and correspondence. This trove has stimulated new research into his work and life. Not all that has emerged is laudatory; Vishniac was something of a fabulist, it seems. Yet the scope of his photographic accomplishments proves to be even greater than was previously thought. This show of 230 framed photographs and some 150 objects is magnificent and revelatory.

Vishniac fled Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and settled in Berlin, where he studied to be a biologist. But Nazi restrictions on Jews prevented him from completing his scientific education there. He was also an accomplished photographer, and from 1935 to 1938 he travelled on assignment for a Jewish relief organisation, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, to document the lives of poor Jews in eastern Europe. The charity sought photographic evidence of desperate need, hoping this would help raise money for these doomed villages. Tragically, these images became a rare record of an extinguished way of life.

In 1940 Vishniac, his wife and their two children arrived in New York and settled on the Upper West Side, where he opened a photo studio. (Marc Chagall was among his more renowned sitters.) Vishniac also resumed his scientific studies, becoming a pioneer in the use of the photomicroscope; his subjects ranged from microbes to a single pine needle. The results not only aided medical research, but also are dazzling images in their own right, and were highly sought after for magazine covers and advertising. Around 100 of these works are included in the ICP’s show.

Vishniac met the Hungarian-born Cornell Capa, another refugee photographer, in 1966. Capa’s commitment to social-documentary photography made him especially receptive to Vishniac’s early eastern European work. Capa staged many exhibitions in which he included Vishniac's work. This eventually led to the publication of a selection of his haunting, beautiful photos as a book, called “A Vanished World”, in 1983. A show of these images toured America and Europe at the time.

Examination of his archive makes clear that Vishniac's famous 1930s images of eastern European Jews tell only part of their story. His commission was to chronicle the lives of the least fortunate—the grim subjects most likely to inspire charity. Yet he took many more photographs than those that were published, little of which has ever been shown in public, though many of these works are among his best. The reason for this remains a mystery. The exhibition is an introduction to the true breadth of Vishniac's range. There are previously unseen images of smiling, even playful eastern European Jews. Another series, taken in Holland, records robust young Jewish men and women as they learned the skills they hoped to use when they arrived in Palestine, from chicken farming to building forges. A commission after the war took him back to Europe, where he recorded the Jews who survived. Weathered and drawn, they are seen here in displaced-person camps waiting for new homes.

The fuller picture, while more illuminating, is no less horrific than the former edited one. Half those would-be kibbutzniks in Holland died in camps. Images of a thriving Berlin also show signs of its Nazification. This ICP survey conveys Vishniac's true brilliance as a photographer, as well as his occasionally enigmatic ambitions as a storyteller. A full catalogue of his archive will be published next year. Our understanding of Roman Vishniac and his gifts clearly has just begun.

"Roman Vishniac Rediscovered" is on view at the International Centre for Photography until May 5th 2013