Vernacular Photographs From the Collection of Dan Lenchner 

Dan Lenchner’s collection of photos of Third Reich life makes the power of the “uncanny” visible.  They are both strange and somehow familiar, these snapshots:Nazi officers at family picnics, weddings and christenings, relaxing off-duty and courting their sweet-hearts, along with mischievous boys at Hitler Youth summer camps, smiling nurses, teen-age girls practicing their goose-step, nuns posing with former students in uniform. Here are the threads in the fabric of a nation given over to war, close to 70 years ago. Still we struggle with what to make of their deeds, which lie so outside the frame. Lenchner, a photographer himself, is acutely attuned to this quality about the truth of any image.  His book quotes Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, that the “trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him…terribly and terrifyingly normal.”