Vishniac was born in Pavlosk to a wealthy Jewish family. He grew up in Moscow, where his fascination with biology and photography began at age seven and he earned a Ph.D. in zoology and became an assistant professor of biology at the Shanyavsky Institute. In 1918 the Bolshevik Revolution triggered a rise in anti-Semitism that caused Vishniac’s family to relocate to Berlin. Between 1935 and 1939 Vishniac traveled to Eastern Europe where he took his acclaimed photographs in villages and urban ghettos. He immigrated to New York with his wife in 1940. Aware of Hitler’s mission to exterminate the Jews, Vishniac was intent on preserving the memory of the Jewish people. In 1947 A Vanished World was published, one of the first pictorial documentations of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. Vishniac was appointed research associate at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1957) and professor of biology (1961). His close relationship with Singer encouraged the author to request the use of Vishniac’s photographs for A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969). These stories of Singer’s early days in Poland from 1908 to 1918 were captured in Vishniac’s photographs.
“Cheder Boys, Carpathian Ruthenia”, ca. 1935-38, from A Day of Pleasure (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969). Mara Vishniac Kohn, Courtesy of the International Center of Photography and Howard Greenberg Gallery
