The faces of Germany

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 2004

ONE OF THE MOST ambitious undertakings in the history of photography, "People of the Twentieth Century" occupied August Sander for some 40 years, from the early 1920s until his death in 1964. He took portraits of countless German citizens and then categorized them by social type and occupation--from farm laborers to circus performers to prosperous businessmen and aristocrats. Remarkable for their unflinching realism and deft analysis of character and lifestyle, Sander's individual images stand out as high points of photographic portraiture and collectively propose the idea of the archive as art.

"Endowed with extraordinary observational powers and heroic determination, August Sander has left us with a compelling collective portrait of the German people during one of the most turbulent periods in history," notes Philippe de Montebello, director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "These powerful images, with their combination of unflattering objectivity and sympathy for the human condition, exert ed a profound influence on later generations of photographers, among them the Americans Walker Evans and Diane Arbus."

The son of a carpenter, Sander was born in 1876 in a farming and mining community east of Cologne. His introduction to picture-taking came while working as a young apprentice in the mines, when a visiting photographer asked the boy to serve as his guide. With the support of his uncle, he soon bought his first photographic equipment.

After military service and apprenticeship in Trier with the photographer Georg Jung, Sander traveled to Berlin, Magdeburg, Halle, Dresden, and Leipzig. He attended the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden as an observer. Eventually, he obtained employment at a photography studio in Linz, Austria, which he took over in 1902--the same year he married Anna Seitmacher--and renamed Studio for Pictorial Photography. He produced a broad range of work, including portrait, architectural, landscape, industrial, and still life photography. His work was exhibited widely, winning a variety of awards.

Despite his provincial background, Sander became involved with many of the avant-garde artistic ideas of his day, among them the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a movement led by his friend, painter Otto Dix, which advocated a return to realism and social commentary in art.

At the outbreak of World War I, Sander was called up for military service and did not return until the war ended in 1918. Around 1922, Sander, who had three children (two sons and a daughter) conceived and embarked on a magnum opus to be called "People of the Twentieth Century," intended, as he stated, to be "a physiognomic image of an age," and a catalogue of "all the characteristics of the universally human." His portrait images were grouped into seven categories, which, in and of themselves, reveal Sander's views of the German social order. He prefaced the project with a "Portfolio of Archetypes" ("Stammappe"), which he then expanded to form the first group, "The Farmer" ("Der Batter"). Six other categories followed: "The Skilled Tradesman" ("Der Handwerker"); "The Woman" ("Die Frau"): "Classes and Professions" ("Die Stande"); "The Artists" ("Die Kunstler"); "The City" ("Die Grobstadt"); and, the final and perhaps most compelling, "The Last People" ("Die Letzten Menschen"), comprising the elderly, de formed, and deceased. What follows is a more complete description of each of the seven categories of the exhibition:

The Farmer. In Sander's view, the farmer's close relationship to nature recommended itself as the prototype for all social relation ships--a concept that reflected the photographer's own upbringing near the village of Herdorf. It also was consistent with contemporary histories of civilization that proposed a correlation between biological and social life cycles; the growth of flora and fauna from birth through maturity, old age, death, and regeneration was paralleled in the development of society from agriculture through craft-guild structures, bourgeois culture, urban decay, and dispersal back to the countryside.

Within this category, Sander identified seven subthemes sequenced according to an organic logic similar to that of the project as a whole. The youth, home, and family life of the farmer open the category, followed by the farmer's workaday life and the people he encountered on a daily basis. The sixth portfolio moves from countryfolk to the "small-town dweller"--just as "The City" is the penultimate phase of the project as a whole.

The Skilled Tradesman. This category is devoted to a group of people whose close relationship to the product of their labor approached that of the farmer. These tradesmen usually were depicted within their working environments alongside typical attributes of their trades. Although the organizing principle behind this category may be difficult to understand today--blacksmiths, revolutionaries, and engineers are all included--the working-class character of its subjects would have constituted a coherent theme within the sociopolitical atmosphere of the Weimar Republic. Each individual possesses specialized knowledge of a particular field related to everyday materials, physical substances, or applied mechanics; this characteristic distinguishes them from their middle-class counterparts in the project's fourth category, "Classes and Professions."