Richard J. Scheuer

In the summer of 1934, Richard J. Scheuer, a seventeen-year-old high school student from New York City, traveled through Europe for eight weeks with a 35mm camera. In France, Spain, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland and the USSR, he made photographs of people at work, and people going about their daily lives. In Warsaw, he documented the vibrant street life of the city’s Jewish district, five years before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. In Moscow, he photographed the city’s legendary Yiddish Theater troupe, as well as avant-garde theater productions.

Dick Scheuer had sailed to France with his father Simon, an investor who had survived the 1929 stock market crash relatively unscathed. Father and son traveled together to Paris, the Basque region, Carcassonne and northern Italy. From Rapallo, Italy, Dick went on a month-long side trip with family friends, without his father, to Venice and on to southern and eastern Europe. His photographs of the Jewish district in Warsaw were likely taken during a single day in that city. In the USSR, he attended the Moscow International Theatre Festival, after which he rejoined his father in France.

Scheuer preserved but never enlarged these images. He finished high school and graduated from Harvard, served in World War II, and went on to a career in real estate. He continued to photograph family and friends as an amateur. Ten years after he died at age 91 in 2008, his 1934 photographs were restored by Charles Seton, and were exhibited in 2022 at the Hebrew Union College in New York. These indelible images reveal a young photographer who met the world with exuberance, empathy and courage.