In Berkeley Talks episode 141, a panel of scholars discuss the work of Roman Vishniac, a renowned Russian American photographer who took thousands of photos over seven decades and across three continents.
Although Vishniac’s genres were diverse, he’s best known for images that he took of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.
“Why do his pictures of Jewish life in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, made approximately between 1935 and 1938, now loom so large in Vishniac’s extensive corpus?” asked Jeffrey Shandler, professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University, at a UC Berkeley event in May.
“These photographs are distinguished by their epiphenomena, the life circumstances of their subjects and the narratives that have surrounded these images,” Efron continued. “Shortly after these photographs were taken, most of the Jews they depict met a terrible fate during World War II. Those few who survived the Holocaust had to start their lives over in radically different circumstances.