AllMovie

From 1935 to 1938, Roman Vishniac photographed Jewish life in Eastern Europe for the American Joint Distribution Committee. With anti-Semitism on the rise, the photographs were created with the intention of raising funds for impoverished Jewish communities. Few could have predicted that these communities would be extinguished less than a decade later, and that Vishniac's photographs would be the last visual records of an entire world. ​​Vishniac follows the artist from his early years in Tsarist Russia to his emergence as a modernist photographer in Weimar Berlin to his journeys across Eastern Europe before the war and his family's dramatic escape to America in 1940, as told through the eyes of his daughter Mara. Vishniac's documentation continues after the war, with photographs of ruined Berlin and children in displaced persons camps. Then, in a stunning shift, he devotes himself almost entirely to scientific photography, where he makes significant contributions to microscopy. His National Science Foundation-funded "Living Biology" series includes some of the first films depicting life as seen through a microscope. They were a common sight in classrooms across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.