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August Sander (Photographer)
Original exhibition text, 1977:
August Sander set for himself a problem that ranks amongst the most ambitious in the history of photography. He assigned himself the project of making a photographic portrait of the German people. He set about his task 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 defined German society. Piece by piece Sander collected the elements for his composite portrait.
His concept and method is almost a caricature of Teutonic methodology, and if it had been executed by a lesser artist the result might well have been another dreary typological catalogue. Sander, however, was a very great photographer. His sensitivity to individual subjects, to expression, gesture, posture and symbols seems unerringly precise. His pictures show two truths simultaneously and intentionally; the social abstraction of occupation and the individual who serves it. The masks reveal every bit as much as the face they attempt to hide.
Sander was a professional portrait photographer but many of his subjects for this great project surely did not pay him. Some doubtless could not, and others, if paying customers, would have expected to be shown less fully revealed. In his professional role he must have made safe and routine portraits but there are none among the photographs shown here. Near the end of his life, August Sander wrote that it was never his intention to define people, but to create a piece of history with his pictures. He found every statement and every individual of consequence, and it is a measure of his artistry and his integrity that he brilliantly succeeded in defining a particular epoch of European history.
From a review in The Observer: ‘He experienced working difficulties in the thirties when the politics of nationality took over and he found himself on the wrong side of the fence with a considerable proportion of his sitters declared Untermenschen. But he perservered on the quiet, rounding out his dossier with schoolboy soldiers and an exquisitely groomed member of the Fuhrer’s SS Guard.’ He created a ‘whole national portrait gallery of urchins, eccentrics, cheats, peace-lovers, Bismarckian businessment, typists, celebrities, Professor Paul Hindemith, and ex-wife of Max Ernst....’ ‘The photographer keeps his distance, seems dispassionate, but you don’t have to be much of a Sherlock Holmes to read character and motive in the ways people presented themselves for his inspection.’