AUGUST SANDER

15.10.11 - 03.12.11

PEOPLE OF THE 20TH CENTURY

GALLERY

August Sander (1876-1964) is regarded as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century. He brought a new, more objective realism to photography and redefined ideas around portraiture. Having become convinced that photography and painting were completely separate media and should follow independent courses, Sander strove for photographic portraits that were sharp and clear, free from retouching or manipulation. Fueled by the Cologne Progressives, a group of radical young painters he met in the early 1920s, Sander embarked on a grand artistic enterprise. He began an ambitious project he called Citizens of the Twentieth Century, and sought to portray the German social order through images of types or population groups. He began by revisiting his earliest portraits of peasants from his native Westerwald region and worked as systematically as a taxidermist, gathering specimen after specimen, from country Jew to storm trooper, from brick layer to fat industrialist, from moon-faced pastry cooks to bloodless dilettantes; all the players of the roles that defined German society. Piece by piece Sander collected the elements for his composite portrait. Sander photographed his subjects in flat light, making no attempt to flatter them, and then printed the unretouched photographs on glossy paper in order to reveal every detail. It is not my intention either to criticise or to describe these people, but to create a piece of history with my pictures, he wrote. Sander believed in a functional individual existence and an integral collective order. Yet he lived through the complete breakdown of his world under Hitlers regime. The city of Cologne, where he and his family had lived and which he had photographed extensively, was destroyed. His home was burned down and his children were in constant danger for their lives. The anti-Nazi activities of his son Erich in 1934 brought Sander himself under government scrutiny. Although his photographs were never intentionally political the sheer diversity of his subjects threatened the Nazis idealised doctrine of a pure, heroic German race. They ordered that all the publishers printing blocks of his volume of photographs entitled, Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time) be destroyed and copies of the book be seized. Sander turned his camera to landscape, nature studies, and industrial architecture. He and his wife survived the Third Reich, but their home was ransacked and their son, Erich, died in a Nazi prison in 1944. While Sander never completed his ambitious Citizens project, he left a compelling body of work reflecting the contradictory and complex nature of the era.