August Sander
(1876-1964)
August Sander; Aperture Masters of Photography
Wikipedia
Sander was born in Herdorf, Germany, 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, Austria, 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 1911, Sander began with the first series of portraits for his work People of the 20th Century. In the early 1920s, he came in contact with the Cologne Progressives a radical group of artists linked to the workers' movement which, as Wieland Schmied put it, "sought to combine constructivism and objectivity, geometry and object, the general and the particular, avant-garde conviction and political engagement, and which perhaps approximated most to the forward looking of New Objectivity [...] ".[2] 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 Face of our Time was published in 1929. It contains a selection of 60 portraits from his series People of the 20th Century, and is introduced by an essay by Alfred Döblin titled "On Faces, Pictures, and their Truth." 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. Thirty thousand of Sander's roughly forty-thousand negatives survived the war, only to perish in an accidental fire in Cologne in 1946. Sander practically ceased to work as a photographer after World War II. He died in Cologne in 1964.
Excerpts
“Sander encouraged his sitters to face the camera confidently against almost any handy backdrop. Reassured by their familiar surroundings and the comforting presence of the undemanding photographer, the subjects presented to the camera the personality and attitude of their choosing.” August Sander, Masters of Photography, Aperture, John von Hartz, p. 5
“Since he believed that the truthfulness of a portrait depended in large part on the rapport between subject and photographer, his photographs were his most eloquent acts of empathy.”
August Sander, Masters of Photography, Aperture, John von Hartz, p. 8
“‘Seen from a certain distance, the differences between the subjects vanish, the individual ceases to exist, and the universality is all that matters.’” (Alfred Doblin, Introduction to Faces of Time)
August Sander, Masters of Photography, Aperture, John von Hartz, p. 9
“Armed with his camera and insights, he went out among his people and brought back images of their souls.”
August Sander, Masters of Photography, Aperture, John von Hartz, p. 9
“August Sander developed a personal style characterized by startlingly direct photographs of German people of all classes and all callings, to produce a body of work unparalleled in the history of photography.”
Beaumont Newhall
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