AUGUST SANDER

August Sander (German, 1876–1964) has been described as “the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century.” While his work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series ‘People of the 20th Century’. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic. The series is divided into seven sections: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People (the homeless, veterans, etc.) By 1945 Sander’s archive included over 40,000 images, but his encyclopedic photographic project was never fully completed. 

In the early 1920s Sander’s came in contact with the Cologne Progressives—a radical group of artists linked to the workers’ movement. The ‘Progressives’, as Wieland Schmied put it, “sought to combine constructivism and objectivity, geometry and object, the general and the particular, avant-garde conviction and political engagement, and which perhaps approximated most to the forward looking of New Objectivity […]”. 

Sander’s classic photobook, ‘Face of our Time’, was published in 1929 and contains a selection of 60 portraits from the series ‘People of the 20th Century’. Alfred Döblin introduces the book, with an essay titled “On Faces, Pictures, and their Truth.”

In 1944 Sander’s Cologne studio was destroyed in a bombing raid. Yet tens of thousands of negatives, which he had left behind in a basement near his former apartment in the city, survived the war. 25,000 to 30,000 negatives in this basement were then destroyed in a 1946 fire. In 2015 MoMA acquired all the remaining 619 photographs that comprise ‘People of the 20th Century.’