(b Herdorf, nr Siegen, 17 Nov 1876; d Cologne, 20 April 1964). German photographer. After seven years as a miner and a period of national service, he studied painting in Dresden from 1901 to 1902, which allowed him to approach photography artistically. He had developed an interest in photography through work in photographic firms in Berlin, Magdeburg, Halle and Dresden from 1898 to 1899. In 1901 he went to Linz, where he first worked in the Greif Studio, which he ran from 1902 with his partner Franz Stukenberg as the Studio Sander & Stukenberg, until he founded the Studio August Sander f?r Kunstphotographie und Malerei in 1904. He sold the studio in 1909 and returned to Cologne, where he ran the Studio Blumberg & Hermann, and in 1910 he founded his own studio in Lindenthal.

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Sander, August (1876-1964), German documentary photographer, introduced to the medium by a photographer depicting the iron-ore mine where he was working. After formal training he settled as a professional in Linz, Austria, working in the pictorialist style. In 1910 he returned to Cologne, where he produced portraits, including those of peasants of his native Westerwald, landscapes, and architectural documentation. In the early 1920s, he met a group of Cologne artists who persuaded him to redefine his portraiture as evidence of a vanishing rural society. In 1925 he embarked on a visual taxonomy of German social types, People of the 20th Century, originally planned around the idea of a photographic history of urbanization from village to metropolis. It was organized along a line drawn from the farmer and artisan, via the ‘average citizen’, to the ‘economic leader’ and ‘intellectual aristocrat’, and ending with marginal ‘last people’: the disabled, mentally ill, and dead. In 1929 he published a preliminary selection entitled Face of our Time. During the Third Reich Sander's activities were hindered and his son Erich imprisoned. Remarkably, c. 1938, he took photographs that in 1947 he included in a portfolio ‘Persecuted Jews’ added to Face of our Time. In 1947 his architectural work Cologne as it Was was supplemented by the portfolio Cologne Destroyed. In the 1950s, Sander fought for recognition of his life's work. Although he died without having seen any of his complete portfolios published, he was eventually hailed as a major European documentarist.

— Rolf Sachsse

Bibliography

• August Sander 1876-1964 (1999)

(ou'gʊst zän'dər) , 1876–1964, Austrian photographer. During his long life Sander made a remarkable composite portrait of the German people. He began his immense work in the early 1890s, making pictures of young men who wanted mementos to give to their families before they emigrated to the United States. He opened a portrait studio in Linz (1904), but a great percentage of his precise, direct, and perceptive portraits were made in the homes and working environments of his sitters. Using large glass plates, he produced a realistic picture of the daily life and look of a vast cross-section of German society that, as a whole, is considered both a sociological and a photographic masterpiece. His subjects included country people, artisans, laborers, technicians, artists, professionals, politicians, aristocrats, and family groups of every sort, the total work comprising an extraordinary human document in which the photographer himself is particularly unobtrusive. Sander also wrote a treatise on the function of photography, Confession of Faith in Photography (1927).

Bibliography

See his Men without Masks: Faces of Germany, 1910–1938 (tr. 1973); G. Sander and U. Keller, ed., August Sander: Citizens of the 20th Century (1986); C. Schreier, August Sander: “In Photography There Are No Unexplained Shadows” (1997); S. Lange and M. Heiting, ed., August Sander: 1876–1964 (1999); S. Lange and G. Conrath-Scholl, August Sander: People of the 20th Century (7 vol., 2002).

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