Everything made by human hands looks terrible under magnification – crude, rough, and unsymmetrical. But in nature, every bit of life is lovely.
– Roman Vishniac
Perhaps better known for his now controversial photographs of Jewish life in prewar Eastern Europe, Roman Vishniac was a scientist whose first love was photomicroscopy. According to Francene Sabin, the “birth of his photomicrography” was prompted when Vishniac’s grandmother gave him a microscope:
“It was 1904; he had just turned seven.The microscope came with three prepared slides and magnified to 150x. Young Roman was instantly captivated by the fantastic world seen through the eyepiece. He soon prepared his own slides with bits of plants, fur from a family pet, insects….His room in the Moscow apartment became a laboratory.”
This childhood fascination with the microscopic world of the living followed him into adulthood. In 1920, with an M.D. in one hand and a Ph.D. in zoology in the other, Vishniac became an assistant professor of biology. During this time, he produced the first-ever, time-lapse films in cinemicroscopy. Years later, he also invented a technique called “diffracted wave contrast”, which was turned down by two German optical companies because of his Jewish descent. Dutch physicist Frits Zernike would later win the Nobel Prize for developing a similar method called “phase-contrast“.
After emigrating to America, Vishniac made nature films for the National Science Foundation and lectured at various universities. One of his goals as an educator was to awaken students to the beauty of their world. He wanted to reveal three-dimensional living creatures doing what they do: swimming, reproducing, eating, surviving. To Vishniac, working with nonliving material “is bad science, because dead matter does not teach about life.” And again:
“There are nice museums with everything in them dead – shells, stuffed animals…But the colors fade, and there is no movement, no magic. How can we learn about nature from these things? We cannot.”
One of Vishniac’s most famous works in photomicroscopy came after being asked to photograph what is seen through the eye of an insect. For weeks, he devoted his time to collecting fireflies and reading everything available on insect vision. The result was a photograph of his daughter Mara behind 4,600 tiny ommatidia.