Roman Vishniac (1897–1990) seemed most at home with animals and insects. The nuzzle of stray kittens warmed his walks as a child in Moscow. Wildlife specimens crowded his Berlin flat while he studied zoology in the 1930s. But the rise of Hitler pushed him to trade his microscope for a Leica and examine his Jewish roots. He set off in 1936 to preserve on film the lives of Jews in eastern Europe, racking up 5,000 miles in four years. This rare and often tender chronicle of small moments in doomed shtetls is the centrepiece of “Roman Vishniac Rediscovered”, a show spanning four decades of street photography, portraits and microscopic images of cells, at the International Centre of Photography in New York until May 5th.