Opening the Roman Vishniac Archive

The International Center of Photography, in a joint effort with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, will offer digital access to its Roman Vishniac archive, the center announced on Tuesday. Vishniac, who was born in Russia in 1897, was commissioned by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to document Eastern European Jewish life between 1935 and 1938. Previously, only three hundred and fifty of his photographs were available; the new digital archive includes almost ten thousand of Vishniac’s negatives. It is, according to the I.C.P., “the most extensive photographic record, by any single photographer, of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.”

All photographs © Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography.