I find it hard to believe that I have never published at any length about August Sander, but all I can find are few brief notes such as one that was a part of the ‘Directory of Notable Photographers’ I was once responsible for, and a number of brief references to him in articles about other photographers.
I know that I have written in greater detail about his life and his work in general, as well as in more detail on a few of his images, and he was certainly one of the photographers whose pictures I talked about when I was teaching. If I do find what I’ve written on him, I’ll publish it in a later post.
I started hunting for my own piece after reading Rena Silverman‘s
Finding the Right Types in August Sander’s Germany in today’s Lens Blog, an article prompted by the recent acquisition by the New York Museum of Modern Art of 619 prints from his project People of the Twentieth Century which he started around 1909 and had to abandon with the rise of the Nazi party, who confiscated and burnt his preliminary publication with 60 images, Antlitz der Zeit, in 1929. A few copies survived and are now fairly expensive.
In looting that followed the end the war, some of his work was destroyed in a fire, but Sander himself survived until 1964. He didn’t entirely give up photographing people in the 1930s, but certainly concentrated more on landscape. I haven’t looked through all of the huge Sander collection at the Getty Museum – apparently 1186 images, and almost all viewable on line – but there are some fine portraits from the 1930s, including some that the Nazis would not have approved of. But most seem to be studio portraits rather than the images of people he travelled his region around Cologne to locate for his typology.
A large volume of Sander’s Menschen des 20. Jahr hunderts was published in Germany in 1980, and I have a copy of the French version published the following year, with 431 portraits from 1892-1952. In the USA it was called ‘Citizens of the 20th Century‘. It’s a very heavy book, really too heavy for its binding, and a larger publication with over 600 plates in 2002 split the work into 7 volumes.
In the article Bodo von Dewitz is quoted as saying “He was the first who worked with what we now call ‘concept’ in photography,” and I think I have several problems with that. Firstly because many earlier photographers from Fox Talbot on could be argued to have worked with ‘concept’, but mainly because what distinguishes Sander’s work is not the concept or even the scale of his work (perhaps rather small compared to say Atget) but its quality.
Although conceived as a part of a great scheme, it is the very individual quality of Sander’s response to his subjects that still holds us, whereas with most contemporary ‘concept’ works the concept overwhelms the motif, producing sets of images of stunning mediocrity. It’s largely their predictability and recognisability that makes them, along with their normal impressive scale into such ideal commercial fine art for the corporate atrium.
There are smaller and more readily appreciated sets of work by Sander elsewhere on the web, including a small and varied set at MoMA, a rather better selection of 32 from ‘People of the Twentieth Century’ at Amber Online, and 24 images at the Edwynn Houk Gallery. There are various other sites devoted to Sander, including some I found it hard to see more than one or two images on.