Lukas Meissel is a Ph.D. candidate in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel. Meissel earned his BA in History at the University of Vienna and his MA in contemporary history at the same university, where he wrote his thesis on photography of Mauthausen. Before beginning his PhD at the University of Haifa, Meissel worked as an historian in the Jewish community archive of Vienna, as a guide to the Mauthausen memorial, and as a project worker for Yad Vashem in Vienna. He has received many awards, including a full PhD scholarship from the University of Haifa and the 2017 Yad Vashem Scholarship. 

During his time at the Center, Meissel explored the Visual History Archive to find survivor counter-narratives relating to SS photography in order to understand more about the circumstances of the production of the photographs, the intentions of the SS photographers, and what is missing from the perpetrators’ photographic record. He argued that camp photographs were used to create specific images that excluded significant aspects of the camps’ reality. Meissel hopes that by juxtaposing the images taken by perpetrators with the perspectives of victims he will be able to contextualize the one-sided visual documentation of the Holocaust and break the visual narrative of its perpetrators.