Colonising Visions:A Physiognomy of Face and Place in Erich Retzlaff’s Book ‘Länder und Völker an der Donau: Rumänien, Bulgarien, Ungarn, Kroatien’

An article exploring Erich Retzlaff's (1899-1993) photographic journey along the Danube in the 1940s. The article explores his use of colour photography and the fact that Retzlaff received support from the Nazi regime to travel. The journey tied into his passion for physiognomy (in this case often a geographic physiognomy) as a visual manifestations of Germanic autarky in Germany’s pan-regions. This is a timely examination of the seemingly innocuous mode of travel photography becoming an incisive populist tool of mass propaganda.