People, Community & Visual Culture: Photography and National Socialism | Isabel Richter (UCB)
Channel: magnesmuseum
Date: 30/11/2018

The second installment of the "Around Arthur Szyk" series in which historians, art historians, media, and Jewish Studies scholars present insightful research and commentary around the figure of Arthur Szyk.

"People, Community, and Visual Culture: Photography as National Socialist Political Practice"

Within the study of the intersections of visual culture and propaganda during the "Third Reich," photography occupies an important place. This talk will discuss two photographers who had high print runs in Nazi Germany. Heinrich Hoffmann (1885-1957) was well known as Hitler's official photographer, and as a member of the Nazi inner circle. Erna Lendvai-Dircksen (1883-1962) documented the "faces of the German People (Volk)" in multiple volumes issued during the Nazi era. The analysis of their work will lead to a broader discussion of what photography represents in documenting Nazi crimes and how anti-Nazi caricatures, such as those created by Arthur Szyk, can be understood in their attempt to contrastNazi visual culture.


Isabel Richter is DAAD Professor at the Department of History and the Department of German at the University of California Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. from the Technical University of Berlin in 2000 and her Habilitation from the University of Bochum in 2009. Her research interests include cultural history and cultural anthropology, the history of National Socialism, and popular cultures and youth cultures in the 20th century. Her most recent research deals with the boom of traveling overland to India in the 1960s and 1970s.
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The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life
University of California, Berkeley
magnes.berkeley.edu