industrially produced without Computer Aided De-
sign (CAD), which leads directly to Computer Aided
Manufacturing. This evolution has had an impact on
photographic fine art as well. In the early 1990s,
Thomas Ruff began to change the look of the dreary
buildings that he photographed by retouching them
heavily on the computer: adding another axis of
windows to give a facade a classical proportion,
melting two frontal views of a very long industrial
park into one image, and so on. Andreas Gursky did
the same with the Shanghai stock exchange and a
huge Parisian edifice; Josef Schulz with long roads in
the Frenchbanlieue.Theimportanceoftheseworks
does not lie in their use of a computerized photo-
montage but in the diminishing difference between
VR and sensual experience. Photography can no
longer guarantee the latter within the act of exposure
as all means of VR crawl into even the most common
and mundane productions of digital imagery. Thus
photography finally refers to its origin in the fine arts
as all art is virtual.
RolfSachsseSeeAlso: Adams, Ansel; Agitprop; Bayer, Herbert;
Beaton, Cecil; Burson, Nancy; Connor, Linda; Dada;
Digital Photography; Discursive Spaces; Fashion
Photography; Gibson, Ralph; Gowin, Emmett;
Gursky, Andreas; Hausmann, Raoul; Hoch, Hannah;
Hoyningen-Huene, George; Laughlin, Clarence John;
Maar, Dora; Man Ray; Manipulation; McBean,
Angus; Meatyard, Ralph; Michals, Duane; Montage;
Photographic ‘‘Truth’’; Propaganda; Rainer, Arnulf;
Rauschenberg, Robert; Ruff, Thomas; Sherman,
Cindy; Solarization; Surrealism; Teige, Karel; Uels-
man, Jerry; Wegman, William; Witkin, Joel-PeterFurther Reading
Hoy, Anne H.Fabrications. Staged, Altered, and Appro-
priated Photographs. New York: Abbeville Press Pub-
lishers 1987.
McGowan, Chris, and Jim McCullaugh.Entertainment in
the Cyberzone, Exploring the Interactive Universe of Mul-
timedia. New York: Random House, 1995.
Mitchell, William J.The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in
the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA, and Lon-
don: MIT Press, 1992.
Photography after Photography. Memory and Representa-
tion in the Digital Age. Exh. cat. Amsterdam: G+B Arts,
1996.
Sobieszek, Robert A.The Art of Persuasion: A History of
Advertising Photography. New York: Harry N. Abrams
Publishers, 1988.
Teitelbaum, Matthew.Montage & Modern Life. Boston,
MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Turkle, Sherry.Life on the Screen. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1995.ROMAN VISHNIAC
Russian
Roman Vishniac, a modern Renaissance Man who
was described by historian Cornell Capa as the ul-
timate ‘‘concerned’’ photographer, was concerned
withalldimensionsoflifefromthemostevilqualities
of man’s inhumanity to man to what he considered
the beautiful, nigh-invisible details in the world of
nature. Remembered mainly for works that compas-
sionately recorded Eastern European Jewish ghet-
tos before the Holocaust obliterated them, works
that Edward Steichen called ‘‘among photography’s
finest documents of a time and place,’’ Vishniac also
achieved extraordinary color microphotographic
images of life forms unseen by the unaided hu-
man eye.
Born on August 19, 1897 in Pavlask near St.
Petersburg, Russia at the dacha or country house
of his mother’s parents, Vishniac’s father Solomon
was son of one of the first Jews to be granted the
legal right to live and work in Moscow, and was a
leading manufacturer of umbrellas and parasols. His
family’s comfortable life contrasted with that of
most Russian Jews, who were routinely denied
access to cities and rights under the law. Solomon
Vishniac often aided fugitive Jews, whose singular
circumstances haunted Vishniac throughout his life.
‘‘They were like hunted animals—a terrible thing to
be. I can never forget them,’’ he remembered.
Vishniac’s lifelong fascination with nature began
as a boy summering in the Russian countryside.
Fascinated by the microscope, at the tender age ofVISHNIAC, ROMAN