the collection is also a gold mine. Not only do the unpublished photographs offer a kaleidoscopic view of prewar Jewish life — women in modern dress and men without hats, religious people comfortably consorting with secular people, shopkeepers with plenty of wares — they also convey a fuller sense of the photographer’s artistic abilities. The result is surprising: Vishniac, who often strained to present himself as superior to others, in fact never showed the world some of his best work. He shot in a variety of styles, not simply the plaintive perspective for which he became famous. Benton cites a picture of two houses in a Carpathian mountain town. “No one would look at this and think Vishniac,” she said. “There’s a compositional acuity about this photo that is just tremendous — and shocking.” As far as Benton is concerned, she has stumbled upon an artist who deserves to be in the canon of great 20th-century social-documentary photography, on par with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.
At this late date, in an age when seemingly every significant photograph of the past 150 years has been anthologized and analyzed, how many major 20th-century photographers can possibly remain under the radar of both the general public and photography aficionados? How many discoveries of unknown, genuinely great photographers can we possibly expect?
