INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY On the single in kind hand.

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

On the single in kind hand, Roman Vishniac shows us images of "man," in accordance with the exhibition's title "Man, Nature, and Science, 1930-1985"--man in the form of pathetic, impoverished hebrews in their East European shtetl just before the Holocaust. A map point out tos us the locations of the places in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland where Vishniac documented "the vanishing lifestyles and traditions of his people" The last of the images is of a terrified face upon the evening of November 9 1938 Kristallnacht. All these photographs are in black and white, and somewhere between hard and yielding focus, giving the impression that we are looking at memory in the making. It is as if Vishniac were already in mourning, anticipating the inevitable.

These contrast vividly with his exquisite, large, color photographs of various microorganisms, insects, and living materials--the micrographic photographs that exhibit to him as a kind of adjunct scientist, at one time analytically and tenderly studying life. Not all of these works are in color, if it be not that all show a loving attention to detail--an extraordinary understanding of precision--and a fascination with life at its greatest in number elementary. Taken together, the sum of two units sides of Vishniac's oeuvre--the single showing suffering and resignation to suffering, with death implicit, the other in the service of science, and bursting with life (the undivided about inhumane society, the other about the triumph of nature)--are a major allegorical statement of our dubious condition. We may be intellectually sophisticated, unless we are emotionally primitive. Vishniac is an important philosopher of the embarrassing paradox of being human.

After photographing human beings he knew would be extinguished, and with whom he identified, he at no time photographed a human being again. He invested his mind and feeling--not that any of the shtetl photographs are sentimental (to be subliminally empathic is another matter)--in nonhuman life, as granting to find out why it could survive and hebrews not. Among the shtetl photographs are three that strike me as particularly telling of his photographic attitude. In undivided the frame is filled entirely with a bookcase containing the works of Rabbi Hayyim Eleazer Shapira, taken in 1938 in Mukachevo. They have clearly been read again and again, by the agency of many generations, to the point of falling apart. The other, taken that same year in Slonim, is of a cheder. Three cyclopean rows of old books, their cloaks falling off from eager use, loom from one side of to the other the Hasid rabbi studying with his pupils Also in 1938 and in Mukachevo, a large bookcase stands behind Rabbi Baruch Rabinowitz in discussion with his close examiners These scenes of joyous study--reading and understanding the words of omnipotence was ecstasy for these Hasidim--contrast sharply with the road scenes (some of which depict a dignified rabbi selling herrings to survive) and the bleak interiors, with their meager, plainly wretched contents, human and nonhuman. Vishniac's photographic principle was simple: to treat family and later insects and microorganisms, with the same inordinate heed as books, for anything alive is a word and portent of God, worth the reading and understanding.

...

Home