August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World
The photographer August Sander’s masterpiece—some six hundred portraits of everyone from a pastry chef to a President, from Jews and Roma to Nazis and demagogues, from engineers and artists to nervous young farmers on their wedding day—bears the irresistibly ambitious title “People of the 20th Century.” At the Yale University Art Gallery, which is showing the complete series in the photographer’s largest exhibition yet, the images are hung in tall, orderly grids, like a periodic table of the human elements. But there aren’t just people in these pictures. Along with a few prop-like horses and cows and one charismatic sheep, there are also quite a few dogs, lovingly included among stiff farming families, or proudly posed with their besuited owners.
Although nearly all of Sander’s subjects look as if they belong to another age, the dogs don’t. In several pictures their heads are blurred, these boys not quite good enough to hold still for the longish exposure of Sander’s tripod-mounted camera. The canines—a Doberman, a miniature Doberman, some German shepherds and collie-looking creatures, a number of hunting dogs of indiscriminate extraction, and one long-haired dachshund trying hard to pretend he’s not soaking wet—are restlessly contemporary. The reason is almost laughably simple: they don’t wear antiquated clothes, they don’t have period mustaches, and their faces and limbs are not variably weathered according to their station, which, when Sander was working, was still largely measured by your closeness to the earth. In other words, the dogs look out from beyond the system of signs we use to sort people—from beyond class, the real subject of Sander’s pictures.
From about 1910 to around 1950, Sander sought to make nothing less than a visual catalogue of all the types and professions in Germany. He even fantasized, in a 1931 lecture, about getting a “total vision of the people on earth”—which, along with his interest in physiognomy, seems a tad sinister in retrospect. Walter Benjamin called Sander’s project “a training atlas,” probably for seeing the world in terms of status, but of course the German state would soon be interested in other kinds of provenance.
Sander wasn’t the first German to use photography in the service of taxonomy. Beginning in the eighteen-nineties, Karl Blossfeldt took closeups of plants abstracted from their environments, making visible the art of their natural curlicues and reticulations. Blossfeldt and Sander, along with Albert Renger-Patzsch, were the leading photographic representatives of the loose movement baptized, in 1925, as the New Objectivity. The goal was to abandon the gauzy artiness of Pictorialism (practiced most famously by Alfred Stieglitz) and the overdetermined zaniness of Dada photomontage (think Hannah Höch) in order to show things as they were.
Still, objectivity is never really objective, and the camera’s putatively clinical perspective had long been used by eugenicists to peddle hateful pseudoscience about the skull sizes and brow shapes of “criminal types” and so-called lesser races. (This history is largely absent from Yale’s admirable just-the-art, ma’am, presentation, curated by Judy Ditner.) Yet Sander’s pictures rarely evince any suggestion of genetic essence or ideal. Despite his claims to universality, Sander thought with his eye, which was attracted to abnormal bodies, unforgettable faces, unkempt free thinkers, and all sorts of people the Nazis would soon label “unerwünscht,” or undesirable. Reassuringly, “Face of our Time,” a sixty-photo series published in 1929, was condemned by one right-wing critic as “a physiognomic document of anarchy and inferior instincts.” The regime later destroyed some of Sander’s printing plates and burned his books.
At the same time, Sander’s project was too personal to be purely political. He sliced society up into seven not quite self-evident categories—the Farmer, Classes and Professions, the Skilled Tradesman, the Artists, the City, the Woman, and the Last People—and at the Yale show each of them gets a wall. The categories are subdivided into smaller, more specific portfolios, and the effect is a kind of social levelling, a carnival through classification. The City, for example, includes the German President Paul von Hindenburg, passing by in a motorcar, as well as circus folk and Roma and a regal Turkish mousetrap salesman who might have been painted by Goya. In the nineteen-thirties, Sander added portfolios of political prisoners, as well as portraits of Jews, many of whom would soon perish in the Holocaust. (Violence is present in Sander’s project only by implication.) In the portfolio “Types and Figures of City,” Sander even inserts a headshot of himself in a black jacket and floppy bow tie, looking like an affable Dracula.
Sander was born in 1876, in a small village near Cologne where, the photographer later recalled, “fish frolic in the stream and trout play nimbly.” His first job was in the local iron mines. A rich uncle sponsored his early photographic efforts, and he was able to cobble together a part-time apprenticeship during his mandatory military service in the final years of the nineteenth century. When he mustered out, Sander set up a successful commercial studio, outfitting himself and his young family with all the trappings of a bourgeois life as he churned out images that shored up the social status of his clients.
The turn arrived in 1909, when he moved to Cologne and found himself struggling to drum up business. Searching for clients, he returned to the countryside, and came back into contact with the people—his people—who would become his first true subjects. Just as Eugène Atget, in those same years, developed a new photographic sensibility by turning his camera on the streets of old Paris, Sander worked out a distinctly modern approach in the twelve photographs he called “Archetypes,” whose men and women preside over his project like elders. He gave rather mystical names (“The Person of the Soil,” “The Philosopher”) to these lusciously wrinkled, pre-industrial faces. A farmer and his wife, allegorized as “Propriety and Harmony,” look out at us from hooded eyes like a beat-down Adam and Eve. The man subtly smiles as he rests a hand on his seated wife’s shoulder, but she holds her mouth in a weary slant and clasps a bouquet of flowers, which, along with her black dress, turn this not so much into an aged nuptial portrait as a memento mori. With bracing clarity and a drop of respectful nostalgia, Sander shows us people as they were, rather than as they wanted to be.
The First World War effectively ended Sander’s commercial work, and in the teens and early twenties he became ever more committed to the poised but unpretentious style he called “exact photography.” His most famous early picture, of three rakish young farmers walking to a country dance in new hats, stiff suits, and too-big shoes, couldn’t have been a commission. It’s too particular, too complicated, and, anyway, the boys probably couldn’t have afforded it. Shot in 1914, the young men are unwittingly walking into the future, just as Sander himself was blazing a path others would follow. “Country Girls, Westerwald,” of two young women holding hands as they stand on a wooded path, dressed in identical black velvet, could have been shot by Diane Arbus, who learned much from Sanders about picturing the point where the individual and the social meet.
The clearest types in Sander’s atlas are the working men, often depicted from head to toe, or down to their knees. They frequently pose with the tools of their trade, like the statuesque bricklayer, who lofts a load of bricks on his shoulders so easily he might as well be a chimney himself, or the pastry chef, dressed in an immaculate white smock, who wields a spoon in a shiny bowl with all the poise of a fencer with his foil. But just as many figures play against type, or seem not to participate in any type at all. There’s nothing butcherly about the dapper, bowler-hatted “Butcher’s Apprentice” who, in one of Sander’s winks, sits in a black suit in the “The Skilled Tradesman” category. And what sort of type is “My Wife in Joy and Sorrow,” a portrait of Sander’s wife, Anna, with their twins Helmut and Sigrid, taken hours before Helmut’s death?
You get the sense that Sander was sincere, and he confers nothing but dignity on the match salesman plying his trade in a doorway, or the disabled veteran posing in his wheelchair at the base of an inaccessible flight of stairs. But that doesn’t mean Sander was always serious. You notice his irony more easily at the Yale show, where you can take in all the pictures at once. Raoul Hausmann, a Dada artist and clearly a friend of Sander’s, shows up in “The City,” as a dancer, and then again flanked by two women in “The Woman,” both times wearing nothing but baggy white trousers, a black beret, and a monocle. But he dresses up in a business suit when posing as “Inventor and Dadaist,” flanked by engineers and marketing execs in the “Skilled Tradesman” category. With Teutonic deadpan, Sander sends up the often ideologically weighted social photography of which his project is an example—and records the giddy, glitchy instability of the Weimar years, when the old order was in disorienting flux, and would soon disappear altogether.
The most frequently recurring character—maybe the project’s quiet protagonist—is Erich. We first meet him as one of a few “working students,”scruffy and intense near some posh fraternity brothers, then as a scowling philosophy undergrad. Later, we see him focussed at a desk as a political prisoner, after he was sentenced, in 1934, to ten years incarceration for being a Communist. And finally, the portfolio titled “The Last People”—of blind people, those with conditions such as dwarfism, and two pictures, both called “Matter,” of the peaceful faces of the elderly dead—ends with a ghostly image of Erich’s death mask, made after he died in captivity in 1944. A portrait of a memory, it’s the most private of Sander’s photographs, and his clearest depiction of how history writes itself on the human face. Sander, who died in 1964, never recovered from the damage done by what he called “the subhumans of the Hitler band.” “People of the 20th Century” is his loving death mask for a world that vanished before his eyes. ♦
