(Jewish Group) How a teenage photographer captured a vanishing world before the Holocaust
In 1934, when American-born photographer Richard J. Scheuer was 17, he went on a continental tour with his father and a 35 mm camera. He took black-and-white photos of ordinary people, often artisans and craftspeople, doing ordinary things, just living their lives.
The photographs, taken in such locales as the Basque region, Budapest, Sarajevo and Warsaw, focused on Jews working, socializing or doing nothing of consequence. The Warsaw photos are especially unsettling as we look at their subjects’ unknowing faces through the prism of hindsight — it was only five years before the apocalypse.
Scheuer’s photos, now on display at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in an exhibit entitled “Street Visions,” are bold and fresh and unabashed. Unlike much portraiture of the era nobody is posed. His attention to physical details, personal gesture and expression as well as his use of natural light are all noteworthy.
Regrettably, Scheuer. whose work seems to anticipate Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand, never became a professional photographer, although he was a hobbyist for the rest of his life; indeed he had a darkroom in his home in Larchmont, New York. In later years, his photographs centered on family.
A street scene in Warsaw captured by a young Richard Scheuer. Courtesy of Dan and Jonathan Scheuer
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