Selected Works
Schoolboy with a toothache, Slonim, Poland, 1937
Morning prayers, Lask, 1937
Hoping for a loan from the credit union, Warsaw, 1938
Isaac Street, Kazimierz (old ghetto), Cracow, 1938
Man praying, Germany, 1947
Human skin, 200 x, 1971
Anthrax bacillus, 2250 x, 1971
Further Reading
Capa, Cornell, ed.The Concerned Photographer 2. New
York: Crossman Publishers, 1971.
———.Roman Vishniac. Vol. 6. ICP Library of Photogra-
phers. New York: International Fund for Concerned
Photography, 1974.
Kohn, Mara Vishniac, ed.Roman Vishniac: Children of a
Vanished World. Santa Barbara: The University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1999.
Vishniac, Roman.Polish Jews. New York: Schocken Books,
1947.
———.A Vanished World. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1983.
———.Building Blocks of Life. New York: Charles Scrib-
ner’s Sons, 1971.
Wiesel, Marion, ed.To Give Them Light: The Legacy of
Roman Vishniac. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Visual anthropology can, in essence, be defined as
both the study of, and the search for, ways of
representing the visible social world. It is based on
the assumption that this world is an important
source of information about forms of social orga-
nization and social relations, and furthermore, that
some kinds of cultural knowledge are only encoded
in visual systems. It also investigates the extent to
which the processing of information carried from
the eye to the brain is culturally differentiated.
The anthropology of art, the study of visual cul-
ture, cultural studies, and the work of some very
diverse visual artists and film and video makers,
bring different histories and different perspectives to
the broad and loosely defined ‘‘field’’ of visual anthro-
pology. Over the past 20 years, its own history has
been different on both sides of the Atlantic as it has
attended to an increasingly wide range of representa-
tional practices and technologies of vision. This
includes photography and the investigation into the
significance of any camera-derived image. Visual
anthropology is an endeavor in which the work of
theorists and artists comes together in revealing ways.
In academic anthropology in North America the
term has come to refer predominantly to the use of
visual media, particularly film and video, and the
history of its use, in the study of the visible social
world. Here the history of visual anthropology is
thought of as the history of anthropology’s relation-
ship with the camera: the history of the deployment of
the camera in research situations, its use as a recording
method, and as an analytical tool, its role in filmed
and published ethnographies, popular and scholarly.
Underlying the notion of visual anthropology, both
its most inclusive, and when it is focused on film, lies
the debate about how to interpret the visual record.
As such it is the most recent problematising of the
claim to objectivity of the documentary impulse. The
camera, it has often been claimed, can indeed record,
in the sense of fixing an action or event in a neutral
image that is then available in perpetuity for any
subsequent analysis. The American anthropologist
Margaret Mead was a pioneer of this use of photo-
graphy in her fieldwork in the 1930s. It has, however,
become increasingly clear that the image is never
neutral, and cannot in itself provide an analysis or
understanding of what it records. At best it provides
what Roland Barthes has called ‘‘fugitive testimony.’’
Any value or meaning that could be discovered in the
imagewoulddependonsuchcontingenciesasthe
identity of the photographer, the circumstances of
its taking, the identity of the viewer and the circum-
stances of their looking. Mead’s husband, the anthro-
pologist Geoffrey Bateson, who acknowledged a debt
to psychoanalysis rather than neutrality in his own
approach to Balinese visual imagery, made this point
forciblyandsynopticallytoMeadinadebateinthe
1970s: ‘‘I’m talking about having control of a camera.
You’re talking about putting a dead camera on top of
a bloody tripod. It sees nothing’’ (Bateson 1977, 79).
As the modernist paradigm faded and with it a
focus on the autonomy of specific media, artists whoVISHNIAC, ROMAN