A Vanished World, is the most important collection of photos of the Eastern European Jews in the years (1934-1939) preceding the Holocaust, and smuggled out of Europe when Vishniac escaped the Nazis in 1940.
Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, 1983
First Edition, 1983 Stated.
180 remarkable photographs by the author, many full-page. Foreword by Nobel winner Elie Wiesel.
Linen bound in dust jacket 12.5 x 12.5 inches, 5.5 lbs.
(ICP.org) Born in Russia to a wealthy Jewish family, Vishniac immigrated to Berlin in 1920. As an amateur photographer, he took to the streets with his camera throughout the 1920s and 30s, offering astute, often humorous visual commentary on his adopted city and experimented with new and modern approaches to framing and composition. Documenting the rise of Nazi power, he focused his lens on the signs of oppression and doom that soon formed the backdrop of his Berlin street photography.
In 1935, Vishniac was commissioned to take these pictures by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) as part of a fundraising initiative. Between 1935 and 1938, he traveled from Berlin to the ghettos of Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Latvia and Lithuania working for the Committee and preserving for posterity images of a Jewish way of life fated soon to be destroyed.
Of the 16,000 photographs taken in Eastern Europe by Vishniac, only 2,000 reached America. When published, photographs were showcased at Columbia University, the Jewish Museum in New York, the International Center of Photography and other institutions.
On 12/31/1940, he arrived in New York and soon opened a portrait studio. At the same time, he began documenting American Jewish communal and immigrant life and established himself as a pioneer in the field of photomicroscopy.
In 1947, Vishniac returned to Europe and documented Jewish displaced persons camps and the ruins of Berlin. During this time, he also recorded the efforts of Holocaust survivors to rebuild their lives, and the work of the JDC and other Jewish relief organizations in providing them with aid and emigration assistance.
Roman Vishniac has received the Memorial Award of the American Society of Magazine Photographers in 1956. A Vanished World has won the National Jewish Book Award in the visual arts category in 1984. The Only Flowers of her Youth was deemed most impressive at the International Photographic Exhibition in Lucerne in 1952, and the Grand Prize for Art in Photography, New York Coliseum.
In 1955 Edward Steichen selected three photographs by Vishniac, of boys at a Cheder in Slonim (1938), of children and a woman in Lublin (1937), for the MoMA The Family of Man exhibition seen by 9 million visitors, with a catalogue which since is reprinted every year.

Roman Vishniac (1897-1990) American, born in Russia.

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