About the Work
The photographer Erna Lendvai-Dircksen gained recognition with her long-term work on series of dramatic, closeup portraits of various groups of the population. Her photo books, among them The Face of the German Volk (1930) and The Face of the Germanic Volk (1942) were used for National Socialist race propaganda. In lectures and publications, she called for a return to the craftsmanship of photography by way of simple but all the more histrionic modes of expression and a concentration on German national themes. She continued her work in the post-war period and in 1961 published further portrait series in the book An Image of the German that made use of National Socialist language, if in somewhat subdued form. In view of her proximity to Nazi racial ideology, any examination of her photographic work—which has yet to undergo thorough scholarly investigation—demands a critical eye.
