August Sander

(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)

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August Sander (17 November 1876 – 20 April 1964) was a German portrait and documentary photographer.

Sander was born in Herdorf as the son of a carpenter working in the mining industry. While working at a local mine, Sander first learned about photography by assisting a photographer who was working for a mining company. With financial support from his uncle, he bought photographic equipment and set up his own darkroom.

He spent his military service (1897–99) as a photographer's assistant, and the next years wandering across Germany. In 1901, he started working for a photo studio in Linz, eventually becoming a partner (1902), and then its sole proprietor (1904). He left Linz at the end of 1909 and set up a new studio in Cologne.

In the early 1920s, Sander joined the "Group of Progressive Artists" in Cologne and began plans to document contemporary society in a portrait series. In 1927, Sander and writer Ludwig Mathar travelled through Sardinia for three months, where he took around 500 photographs. However, a planned book detailing his travels was not completed.

Sander's first book Face of our Time was published in 1929. It contains a selection of 60 portraits from his series People of the 20th Century. Under the Nazi regime, his work and personal life were greatly constrained. His son Erich, who was a member of the left wing Socialist Workers' Party (SAP), was arrested in 1934 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he died in 1944, shortly before the end of his sentence. Sander's book Face of our Time was seized in 1936 and the photographic plates destroyed. Around 1942, during World War II, he left Cologne and moved to a rural area, allowing him to save most of his negatives. His studio was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid.

Sander died in Cologne. His work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is most well 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, The Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People (homeless persons, veterans, etc.). By 1945, Sander's archive included over 40,000 images.

In 2002, the August Sander Archiv and scholar Susanne Lange published a seven-volume collection comprising some 650 of Sander's photographs (August Sander: People of the 20th Century, Harry N. Abrams, $195).

References

• August Sander Archiv and Susanne Lange, August Sander: People of the 20th Century, 7 vols, 2002, Harry N. Abrams.

External links

• Photographs of August Sander
• 29 Photographs by August Sander
• A biography of the artist August Sander from the J. Paul Getty Museum
• August Sander archive
• Special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Just Regular Volks--August Sander's Portraits of Ordinary Germans Between the Two Wars Capture a Universe of Humanity

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