Nothing Living Is Simple
Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, an exhibit at the Photographers’ Gallery & the Jewish Museum, London, October 26, 2018–February 24, 2019.
AFTER THE last gifts had been opened on his seventh birthday, the young Roman Vishniac took the microscope and camera he had received and hastily affixed one to the other before capturing his first-ever photograph: a study of the segments and spines of a cockroach leg at 150x magnification. Like an overture introducing a symphonic theme, this single moment—unbeknownst to the little boy fiddling now with the focus knobs, now with the aperture—brought together the twin leitmotifs that would play themselves out through the end of his life.
The son of an umbrella magnate and a diamond heiress, Vishniac grew up in Moscow at a time when the tsarist government generally forbade Jews from residing within the city walls. Still, he was able to obtain a spot at one of Moscow’s universities, despite the strict Jewish quotas. In the zoology department of the Shanyavsky Institute, Vishniac immersed himself in recording. But the turmoil of the October Revolution scuttled his plans to publish, and the flare-ups of antisemitism that coincided with the Bolsheviks’ rise pushed him and his family westward to Berlin. Faintly visible in the tender amateur snapshots Vishniac took while on his honeymoon with Luta Begg (whom he married shortly after moving to Germany in 1920) is an early intimation of the style for which he would soon become known when hobby turned into profession: an eye for capturing the soft moments of contemplation, and an interest, above all else, in the human figure.
