were done with available light or sometimes a lantern, yet they are "amazingly crisp with surprising depth of field". Indeed, "There is a grainy realism to Vishniac's photographic style. We can almost finger the coarse textures of coats and shawls; the layers of fabric worn by the people seem more related to tree bark than to the well-pressed wool suit worn by an occasional elegant passerby." Vishniac is known to have exaggerated in composing the captions of his photographs, and in some cases he may have fabricated the stories behind them. Impact Vishniac's photographs from this period are widely commended and on permanent display in many museums. Edward Steichen places his pre-Holocaust photographs, "among photography's finest documents of a time and place."' Vishniac's photographs have had a profound effect on Holocaust literature and have illustrated many books about the Jewish ghettos and Holocaust. In the case of The Only Flowers of her Youth, the drama of the photograph inspired Miriam Nerlove to write a novel based on the story of the girl in the picture. For this work, Roman Vishniac has received the Memorial Award of the American Society of Magazine Photographers in 1956. A Vanished World has won the National Jewish Book Award in the visual arts category in 1984; The Only Flowers of her Youth was deemed "most impressive" at the International Photographic Exhibition in Lucerne in 1952; and the Grand Prize for Art in Photography, New York Coliseum. In 1955 Edward Steichen selected three of Vishniac's Eastern European photographs; of boys at a Cheder in Slonim (1938), of children and a woman in Lublin (1937), for the Museum of Modern Art world-touring The Family of Man exhibition that was seen by 9 million visitors, accompanied by a catalogue which has never been out of print. Criticism There has been criticism of Vishniac's work, focusing on the lack of diversity of his subjects in his work from Eastern Europe and quality of his composition. It has been argued that he should have also photographed wealthier Jews, in addition to the poor Jews in ghettos. Thornton criticized his photographs for their unprofessional qualities, citing "errors of focus and accidents of design, as when an unexplained third leg and foot protrudes from the long coat of a hurrying scholar." When photographic curator Maya Benton began to catalog Vishniac's negatives for the archive of the International Center of Photography, she noticed