Based on what I’ve just read over at Body Impolitic (tip of the hat to Alas), it looks like the answer might very well be yes. His images of Jew­ish life in Europe have come to define for us what Jew­ish life was like before the Holo­caust and, there­fore, what the Holo­caust destroyed. But

As [Maya] Ben­ton [the cura­tor who has dis­cov­ered new work by Vish­niac] has dis­cov­ered, Vish­niac released, over the course of a five-decade career, an uncom­monly small selec­tion of his work for pub­lic con­sump­tion — so small, in fact, that it did not include many of his finest images, artis­ti­cally speak­ing. Instead the cho­sen images were, in the main, those that advanced an impres­sion of the shtetl as pop­u­lated largely by poor, pious, embat­tled Jews — an impres­sion aided by crop­ping and fab­u­list cap­tion­ing done by his own hand. Vishniac’s curat­ing job was so com­pre­hen­sive that it would not only limit the appre­ci­a­tion of his tal­ents but also skew the pop­u­lar con­cep­tion of pre-Holocaust Jew­ish life in Europe.

…

Jew­ish life in East­ern Europe, espe­cially in the inter­war years, was roil­ing and diverse. All kinds of peo­ple — sec­u­lar and reli­gious, urban and rural, wealthy and poor — con­sorted freely with one another in all aspects of what many of us would con­sider the pil­lars of a mod­ern soci­ety: a lively and con­tentious polit­i­cal cul­ture, a the­ater scene that rivaled those of most major Euro­pean cities, a lit­er­ary tra­di­tion com­pris­ing not only Yid­dish and Hebrew work but also Euro­pean fic­tion and a thriv­ing eco­nomic trade that suc­cess­fully linked cities and coun­try­sides (one of Vishniac’s unpub­lished pic­tures shows a store in a tiny East­ern Euro­pean town sell­ing oranges imported from Pales­tine). Even Hasidic life, so eas­ily car­i­ca­tured as provin­cial and iso­lated, was noth­ing of the sort: yeshivas, like today’s uni­ver­si­ties, often attracted stu­dents from all over East­ern and Cen­tral Europe. The con­cen­tra­tion of poverty and piety in Vishniac’s pic­tures in “Pol­ish Jews” cre­ated a dis­tinct impres­sion of time­less­ness, an unchang­ing, “authen­tic soci­ety” cap­tured in amber.

The quote is from a New York Times arti­cle by Alana New­house, which is worth reading.

As I sit here think­ing about this, aside from the cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance that comes from know­ing I will have to revise my image of what those pho­tographs stand for – espe­cially given the fact that some of them were con­sciously manip­u­lated to cre­ate an image that, while not pre­cisely false, did not reflect the real­ity of the peo­ple in the pic­tures Vish­niac took – I am also think­ing how much the eth­i­cal ques­tions sur­round­ing doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy and the way images can be manip­u­lated resem­ble the eth­i­cal ques­tions that have been raised in terms of mem­oir. Each genre claims to rep­re­sent real­ity; each genre is rooted – as is all art – in the choices made by the artist; each genre depends for its suc­cess on an audience’s trust, a trust that is enlisted by the nature of the genre – in other words, a trust with­out which the genre can­not be read the way it is meant to be read – and it is a trust so very eas­ily betrayed. What Roman Vish­niac did does not sound so dif­fer­ent to me from what James Frey did, but Vish­niac was also claim­ing in a very gen­eral way to speak for me, not merely to rep­re­sent his own expe­ri­ence, and that makes the betrayal – but is it a betrayal? as I write this, I am still not com­pletely sure – bit­ter.