This portrait is a rare early work by the German
photographer Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, who is best known for her images promoting National
Socialist ideologies. During the Weimar era, she began a massive project to
document the rural people, landscapes, and architecture of every region in
Germany, publishing her images in the multivolume book Das deutsche Volksgesicht (The Face of the German People) in 1932, and
she was commissioned by the state to photograph workers constructing the new national
highways in 1937. This portrait of a dancer was likely taken in her studio in
Berlin and reveals a different side of her practice, one more influenced by the
painterly aesthetics of Pictorialism than by contemporary politics.