[12] 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.
[4][13][14] 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.
[16] 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.
[4][17] 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,[18][19] where from the 1950s she began to concentrate on landscape photography in colour.
The same year, she was accorded a special exhibition in Erfurt by the Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner (Society of German Photographers, predecessor of the Deutsche Fotografische Akademie).
[18][21][22] Lendvai-Dircksen's portraits of farmers suited the Nazi ethos except that in her initial publication, almost all her subjects were old, and indeed she clearly portrayed the damage to their bodies as a sign of authenticity.
[4] As pointed out by Berlin photographic curator Janos Frecot in the catalogue of an exhibition at the Albertina which included her work, her portraits and those of others at the time can be seen as applications of the same ethnographic principle as portraits of people in faraway cultures;[4] similarly, Leesa Rittelmann has shown that the same principle of characterising a country by the physiognomies of its people, although a throwback to 19th-century theories,[25] was shared by Weimar-era photographers such as the progressive August Sander, in his Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time).