Roman Vishniac (1897–1990)

Roman Vishniac (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. A complete archive of his work now rests at the International Center of Photography. 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 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 great humanism, respect and awe for life, sentiments that can be seen in all aspects of his work. [from Wikipedia]