Roman Vishniac was acutely aware of how historical developments affected the perception of his work. During the 1940s and 1950s, he assembled a scrapbook documenting the evolving appearance of his photography in print, examples of which are shown here. The clippings demonstrate the various ways in which the meaning and use of his images changed along with the fate of the eastern European Jews he had documented. Vishniac’s JDC-commissioned photographs from the mid- to late 1930s figured in multiple narratives during World War II: the increasingly calamitous situation of eastern European Jews and their need for international support and relief; their deplorable fate in the ghettos and camps after the Nazi invasion; the desperate necessity of children’s immigration to Palestine, England, or the U.S.; and the need for political and military intervention. But as the fate of European Jews became increasingly dire in the 1940s, philanthropic organizations including the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) adjusted the focus of their relief efforts accordingly. Vishniac’s 1942 letter to President Roosevelt testifies to the shift in the way his photographs were both employed and received; by the early 1940s, images that only four years before had been used to argue for intervention, now came to represent the final photographic record of a world on the brink of annihilation.

At the same time, the publication of Vishniac’s photographs promoting the activities of the National Refugee Service (NRS) reflected yet another narrative: Holocaust refugees leaving behind a devastated Europe for a bright future in America. These images provided a vital counterpoint to the horrific devastation of the war, and the scrapbook underscores how Vishniac’s situation—as a European Jewish immigrant in America—came to mirror that of his subjects.

Maya Benton, Curator