Erna Lendvai-Dircksen

• Name — Erna Lendvai-Dircksen • Birth Name — Erna Katherina Wilhelmine Dircksen • Born — 31 May 1883 • Birthplace — Wetterburg, Waldeck, German Empire • Died — 8 May 1962 • Place of death — Coburg, Bavaria, West Germany • Occupation — Photographer

Born in Wetterburg, now part of Bad Arolsen, Erna Dircksen studied painting at the Kunsthochschule Kassel from 1903 to 1905, and photography at the Lette-Verein from 1910 to 1911. She may have opened a photographic studio in Hellerau, near Dresden, in 1913. From 1916 to 1943, she had a portrait studio in Berlin. By 1918 she had a growing reputation, particularly for her nude photography, and was increasingly using a highly realistic style. Already in 1911, she had become interested in portraying the country people of Germany, after accidentally photographing a blacksmith and a farmer while on holiday. In her writings she later expressed a highly romantic view of rural life and contempt for urban life. Beginning in 1917, she made a series of photo-portraits of Germans of different regions, a selection of which won first prize at an exhibition in Frankfurt in 1926. On the strength of this she was able to publish some of them in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung in 1930.

Lendvai-Dircksen published her portraits of rural Germans as Das deutsche Volksgesicht (The Face of the German Volk) in 1932. It was continued in multiple volumes portraying different regions of the Reich beginning in 1942, both under that title and as Das germanische Volksgesicht (The Face of the Germanic Volk), now including volumes on, for example, Flanders and Norway.

Under the Third Reich she received state commissions, notably one from Fritz Todt for portraits of Autobahn construction workers, originally commissioned for the Schaffendes Volk exhibition of 1937 as part of Todt's effort to have the best photographers in the Reich artistically reproduce the new autobahn. Todt specifically required her to "photographically [depict] the visages of his Reich autobahn workers from the various regions of the Fatherland". The book appeared in 1937 and in a revised edition in 1942. Presumably Todt chose her on the basis of her work in Das deutsche Volksgesicht, and the autobahn book follows a similar plan, following the course of the construction from North Germany south into the Alps, and in each region following illustrations of the landscape and the autobahn, especially the bridges, with depictions of local men working on the project. Her pictures of the new bridges emphasise the stonework and the aesthetics of the arches, in some cases using compositional techniques reminiscent of New Objectivity, in others situating the gigantic constructions in nature and in tradition, suggesting their lengthy future existence; in one image, a farmer ploughing with a team of oxen is shown beneath an autobahn bridge. Those of the workers, which dominate the book, heroicise them by depicting them individually, in tight close-up and from beneath; she makes use of the "cult of the beautiful body" as in Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia. Only occasionally does she pose them looking at the camera, and she rarely shows their tools and then only as illustrations of strength or elements of the composition; she also emphasises hand-work, giving the impression the autobahn was built using very little heavy machinery. Captions such as "After years of unemployment, I am once again earning honest bread for seven sons and a daughter" emphasise the importance of the autobahn as a means of reducing unemployment, and ignore the reality of forced labour and the bad conditions in the workers' camps reported by eyewitnesses in favour of the propaganda message.

She was also the main photographer of children for the eugenicist periodical Volk und Rasse, posing them in traditional dress and under harsh lighting to clearly capture their desirable racial characteristics.

In 1943, to escape the bombing of Berlin, she moved to Upper Silesia; in 1945 she lost her archives fleeing from there, and settled in Coburg, where from the 1950s she began to concentrate on landscape photography in colour. Her postwar work is housed in the Agfa Foto-Historama in Cologne.

Dircksen was married from 1906 to 1910 to Adolf Göschel, with whom she had a daughter, and from 1913 to 1924 to the Hungarian composer Erwin Lendvai. She died in 1962 in Coburg.