Upload
kerry-side-gallery
View
218
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
7/28/2019 August Sander Exhibition text
1/1
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 redened 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 dened German society. Piece by piece Sander collected the elements for his composite portrait.
Sander photographed his subjects in at light, making no attempt to atter them, and then printed the un-
retouched 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 reecting the
contradictory and complex nature of the era.
GALLERY
AUGUST SANDERPEOPLE OF THE 20TH CENTURY
15.10.11 - 03.12.11