Film Screening | Vishniac

From the cosmopolitan streets of prewar Berlin to the shtetls in Poland and Lithuania to the Princeton offices of Albert Einstein, Vishniac takes viewers on a journey through the lens of one of the foremost photographers of the twentieth century. Roman Vishniac (1897–1990) is best known for having traversed Eastern Europe from 1935 through 1938, on assignment for the American Joint Distribution Committee, to photograph Jewish life. Smuggled out of Europe during the war, the photographs are among the last images of a culture before it vanished. Laura Bialis’s documentary, with a narration by Vishniac’s daughter, Mara Kohn Vishniac, follows the full trajectory of his career as an artist and scientist who wanted to make the invisible visible and whose forays into color microscopic photography open our eyes to the hidden world around us. The Magnes is the keeper of Vishniac’s extraordinary photography collection of some thirty thousand images in the Roman Vishniac Archive.

Vishniac also screens Friday, February 4 (with special guests Laura Bialis and Veronica Selver in conversation).

Co-presented by BAMPFA and The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. Special thanks to Taube Philanthropies, the Libitzky Family Foundation, Richard Nagler, and an anonymous donor for supporting the care and processing of the Roman Vishniac Archive.

Tickets: $5 – $14