Born 1897 in Pawlowsk near Sankt Petersburg, Russia. Died 1990 in New York, USA.

The photographer Roman Vishniac was born to a wealthy Russian-Jewish family that immigrated to Berlin in 1920 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. As an amateur photographer, he took to the streets with his camera throughout the 1920s and ’30s, offering astute, often humorous visual commentary on his adopted city and experimented with new and modern approaches to framing and composition. He created some of the most iconic images of Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust, documenting a world that would soon vanish. He also chronicled the rise of Nazism and the aftermath of World War II. From 1935 to 1938, while living in Berlin and working as a biologist and science photographer, he was commissioned by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), then the world’s largest Jewish relief organization, to photograph impoverished Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe. On New Year’s Day, 1941, he arrived in New York and soon opened a portrait studio. He also began documenting American Jewish communal and immigrant life and established himself as a pioneer in the field of photomicroscopy. In 1947, Vishniac returned to Europe and documented the ruins of Berlin, as well as efforts of Holocaust survivors to rebuild their lives.

Roman Vishniac’s works are represented in international collections including the Fotostiftung Schweiz; International Center of Photography, New York, USA; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, USA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, USA.