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Roman Vishniac (Russian: Роман Вишняк; August 19, 1897 – January 22, 1990) was a renowned Russian-American photographer, best known for capturing on film the culture of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

Vishniac was an extremely diverse photographer, an accomplished biologist and a knowledgeable collector and teacher of art history. Throughout his life, he made significant scientific contributions to the fields of photomicroscopy and time-lapse photography. Vishniac was very interested in history, especially that of his ancestors. In turn, he was strongly tied to his Jewish roots and was a Zionist later in life.

Roman Vishniac won international acclaim for his photography: his pictures from the shtetlach and Jewish ghettos, celebrity portraits, and images of microscopic biology. He is known for his book A Vanished World, published in 1983, which was one of the first such pictorial documentations of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe from that period and also for his extreme humanism, respect and awe for life, sentiments that can be seen in all aspects of his work.

Biography

Early life

Roman was born in his grandparent's dacha outside of Saint Petersburg, in the town of Pavlovsk, and grew up in Moscow. To live in this city was a right granted to few Jews but Roman could live there because his father, Solomon Vishniac, was a wealthy manufacturer of umbrellas, and his mother, Manya, was the daughter of affluent diamond dealers (Roman also had a sister, Katja). During the summer months; however, the Vishniacs would leave: Moscow often became uncomfortably hot and the family would retreat to a dacha a few miles outside of that city.

As a child, Roman Vishniac was fascinated by biology and photography, and his room was filled with \"plants, insects, fish and small animals\". On his seventh birthday, Roman got a microscope from his grandmother, to which he promptly hooked up a camera, and by which he photographed the muscles in a cockroach's leg at 150 times magnification. Young Vishniac used this microscope extensively, viewing and photographing everything he could find, from dead insects to animal scales, to pollen and protozoa.

Read more at Wikipedia.org