Evelyn Urban

As a university assistant in the field of 18th to 20th century art history, Evelyn Urban is particularly interested in the interfaces between art, ideology and political propaganda.

As part of her master's thesis, she not only explored art historical themes such as motivic and compositional aspects of selected war photographs by Lee Miller, but also discussed ethical questions regarding the depiction or representability of atrocities and human suffering.

With her dissertation project, the art historian is pursuing the goal of recording Erna Lendvai-Dircksen's photographic work during the Third Reich and critically scrutinising it with regard to its ideological classification. Against the background of iconographic and formal aspects, the aim is to examine the photographer's work for possible (dis)continuities within her oeuvre. The central question to be explored is the extent to which the identity of the people depicted was constructed through the combination of physiognomic features and landscape elements.