HOW TO PORTRAY A PEOPLE

Around the First World War, August Sander embarked on his major photographic project: to capture the 20th-century population. He wanted to document and portray the German people, individual by individual, occupation by occupation, class by class, and to present the result in a photographic encyclopaedia.

Sander published sixty portraits in the book "Antlitz der Zeit" [The Face of Our Time] in 1929. The pictures of academics, the unemployed, farmers, soldiers and others was an attempt at a psychological portrait of the people and the times. The idea was that the formal style of these portraits would convey the nature of the different occupations. This style was eventually named the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). In Sander’s incisive images, we meet the baker, the student, the office worker, the builder and the artist. What were their fates?

The social reality was soon to change, however. During the Nazis, Sander had to give up his project, since the pictures were not compatible with their notion of an “Aryan” people. In 1936, his photos were banned, the plates were destroyed and the book was confiscated. After the Second World War, Sander expanded his body of work with portraits of the victims of the Nazi terror and persecution.