11/26/2018 Vishniac's photo archive lands at Magnes, including unseen Israel images – J.

The Jewish News

of Northern California

These never before seen pictures of Israel in 1967 by legendary photographer Roman Vishniac have arrived at the Magnes as part of a
large archive of his work.

CULTURE > PHOTOGRAPHY

Vishniac’s photo archive lands at

Magnes, including unseen Israel
images
BY ROBERT NAGLER MILLER | NOVEMBER 20, 2018

I n a development that will add gravitas to the Bay Area art world and lead to a
greater understanding of 20th-century Jewish history and culture, the Magnes
Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley has been gifted the complete archive
of the late Roman Vishniac, the internationally renowned photographer.

The announcement was made today by Magnes curator Francesco Spagnolo, who
noted that the Vishniac archive, on loan since 2005 at New York’s International Center
for Photography (ICP), is a vast visual cornucopia: approximately 6,500 prints, 10,000
slides, 40 albums of negatives, 20 binders of contact sheets, 1,500 scientific prints, 400
audiovisual recordings, and a large number of personal documents and notebooks.

Vishniac, who died in 1990 when he was 92, is perhaps best known for his 1983 coffee-
table book “A Vanished World,” a visual elegy to the Jews of Eastern and Central
Europe in the 1930s, just years before most of them perished in Hitler’s death camps.
But as evidenced by the international traveling show, “Roman Vishniac Rediscovered,”
which came to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco in 2016, he was
much more than a documentarian of the shtetl Jews of Poland, Ukraine, Romania,
Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia.

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“Amino Acid (00 000),” ca. 1970 by Roman Vishniac

While much of Vishniac’s work was done in the service of Jewish philanthropy —
indeed, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee hired him to boost
awareness and fundraising efforts — he also took thousands of other photographs:
secular Jews in more urbanized settings, pre- and post-World War II, as well as
citizens of Israel in the country’s early years. Indeed, among some of the hundreds of
boxes of images that the Magnes received are pictures taken in Israel immediately
following the Six-Day War, none of which have ever been published or exhibited,
according to Spagnolo.

Of particular interest to art connoisseurs and science researchers is Vishniac’s

scientific photography, in which he focused his lens on the natural world, including
cell, plant and animal life.

“He looked at the humanities with a scientific eye, and he looked at the sciences with a
humanistic eye,” said Spagnolo, praising Vishniac for not only his aesthetic technique
but also for an “empathy” toward all of life — not just the human variety.

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11/26/2018 Vishniac's photo archive lands at Magnes, including unseen Israel images – J.

Albert Einstein in his of ce, at Princeton University, 1942 by Roman Vishniac

The origins of the Magnes acquisition, Spagnolo said, date back two years or so, when
the museum received a gift of 20 Vishniac prints from the ICP, including a portrait of
Albert Einstein. The museum mounted a small exhibition of these photos in early 2017
and invited the photographer’s daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, now 92 and living in
Santa Barbara, to participate in a public conversation about the work with Spagnolo
and Zoe Lewin, then a Berkeley student, who co-curated the show with Spagnolo.

Kohn and her two children, Naomi Schiff, a longtime Oakland resident, and Ben Schiff,
a recently retired Oberlin College professor with a doctorate from Berkeley who
recently moved to the Bay Area, were extremely pleased with the reception they
encountered at the Magnes, said Spagnolo. Talks about the future of the Vishniac
archive ensued, culminating in its move from New York to Berkeley over the past
weeks.

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11/26/2018 Vishniac's photo archive lands at Magnes, including unseen Israel images – J.
Contact sheet of Roman Vishniac’s shots of New York’s Chinatown

Of tantamount significance, said Spagnolo, was the Kohn-Schiff family’s transfer of

copyright of Vishniac’s body of work to the Magnes and Berkeley. “It’s a definitive
choice that the family made” in determining to house the collection under the auspices
of a leading public university, he said.

Spagnolo said the scope of the collection is such that reviewing and organizing the
archive in a meaningful way will entail a “multiyear project” that may even exceed his
tenure at the Magnes. It is premature, he said, to conceive of the precise nature of
future Vishniac shows at the Magnes, but he said the museum will surely find
opportunities to showcase some of the photographer’s work in upcoming exhibits, just
as it did after receiving artist Arthur Szyk’s collection as a gift last year. In the
meantime, he said, the process of discovery is “exciting,” because it will result in “any
number of narratives” that have yet to be uncovered.

Most of the Vishniac archive, Spagnolo said, will be held at the Magnes’ building on
Allston Way, with the remainder kept in climate-controlled university storage. “The
Magnes was designed to hold a collection on-site so that it can be accessible” to
students, scholars and the community at large, he noted.

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Robert Nagler Miller

Robert Nagler Miller, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wesleyan University,

received his master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School
of Journalism. For more than 25 years, he worked as a writer and editor at a
variety of nonpro ts in the Los Angeles and Bay Areas. In 2016, he and his husband, Dr. Arnold

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