August Sander
August Sander was born in Germany in 1876. He became involved in photography early in life, assisting a photographer working for the mine Sander’s father also worked at. After this encounter Sander then began to make a living as a studio photographer in Linz, Austria, while working on his own photographic projects.
His first major work, entitled Faces of Our Time was published in 1929. The concept was simple; it consisted of sixty photographs of German people. What was significant about it was who those people were, a true cross section of German society. Pastry chefs, bricklayers, and farmers were depicted alongside industrialists, bureaucrats, and the well to do. Such a project sounds simple today, but at the time it was not only ambitious but also subversive.
It was ambitious in terms of the country Sander had set out to portray. Germany, at the time he took many of photographs had only been only a united country for forty years, and was still profoundly divided by class, religion, ideology, geography and even language. Even with Sander limiting himself largely to the area where he lived, he had set himself an incredibly difficult photographic task. It was even more ambitious to try and make such a document meaningful given that the final book was a mere sixty photographs long. Sander is supposed to have taken ten times the number of photographs that were eventually published, which gives you a sense of the care with which the final selection must have been made.
Looking at the photographs there are still gaping holes, sections of society simply not included, the industrial working classes for example. Germany was then, as now an industrial powerhouse, and hundreds of thousands of working class Germans eeked out an existence in mills and factories, living in the cramped ‘rent barracks’ that covered large areas of cities like Berlin. Yet these people, so important in early twentieth century German history, are largely absent from Sanders project. Still, those sections of society that are represented manage to cover a really remarkable range of professions, classes, and political and religious beliefs, and go a long way to conveying the heterogeneity of German society.
Historically it’s also an interesting series. Some professions or activities appear virtually unchanged; the two grinning boxers could have been photographed in the last few decades, not a century ago. Others appear completely anachronistic. The member of a student duelling fraternity, scarred face at odds with ornate duelling uniform is one photograph that always grabs me. The three revolutionaries huddled on a step, looking uncomfortably self-conscious and almost like cartoon caricatures of the mad bomb waving anarchist is another one that seems quite incredible now.
The portraits are also beautiful, works of art as much as works of documentary photography. Most look like studio portraits, with blank backgrounds focusing all the viewers attention on the subject. This was perhaps Sander’s default mode, given that he had earned a living from studio photographs for many years. Interestingly though the poses of many of these subjects suggest the photographs are slightly less artificial than they at first seem. There is a candid air to many of them, as if the subjects had been caught on a street corner against a blank wall. Others are obviously location shots, although still with a certain rigidity about them that probably reflects the type of large format camera Sander used. None of these are candid snapshots, but planned, considered documents.
The timing of Faces of Our Time couldn’t have been worse however. Four years after the publication of the book, the Nazi Party was elected to power. The Nazis had a very clear vision of what Germany was, and who Germans were, and Sander’s project was completely incompatible with these ideas. His book was pulped, many of his negatives were destroyed and he began to live a perilous existence. Remarkably though, and unlike so many left leaning artists, Sander did not leave Germany but remained there during the war and continued to photograph, focusing on landscape and architectural photographs that were less controversial. August Sander died in 1963.
