NB: This show is on at both The Photographers' Gallery and The Jewish Museum.
Many visitors to ‘Roman Vishniac: Rediscovered’ will likely be discovering him full stop, nevermind the ‘re-’ part. But if they are familiar with the Russian-born photographer, it will be for his series of images capturing the plight of impoverished Jews living in Eastern Europe pre-WWII.
This joint exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery and Jewish Museum goes way, way beyond those best-known works, showing how they’re only one planet in Vishniac’s solar system of a career.
Loosely speaking, the larger show at The Photographers’ Gallery is created with the artistry of the images in mind, whilst The Jewish Museum’s focus is more on their social and political history. It’s fair to say, however, that there’s a huge amount of cross-over, right down to the identical information panels on the walls.
Vishniac’s work is inextricable from its Jewish subjects, whether in 1930s Germany or in post-war America, and it’s often delicately and stylishly composed. So the photos at the Photographers’ Gallery are as Jewish as the ones on display in Camden, and the ones at the Jewish Museum are works of art as much as the ones down in central London.
Both shows are designed so they can be visited independently. But it’s worth seeing both precisely because of how much they overlap. In one particularly pleasing ‘spot-the-difference’ moment, a funeral in New York’s Chinatown is literally shown from a different angle.
The real coup, however, is just how much these shows expand on what is commonly remembered of Vishniac’s output. A famous portrait of Einstein appears, along with a series taken in the racially-integrated Cafe Society nightclub and a burlesque venue. There are also some beautiful shots of nursing students training in the US.
And that’s before you get to Vishniac’s ‘other’ career pioneering colour photomicroscopy. Super-dooper-close-ups of mosquito larvae, butterfly wing scales, haemoglobin crystals and (surprisingly lovely) slime mould flip by on a video screen that’s a little bit hypnotising to watch. Worth both discovering and rediscovering.