August Sander’s Open Work
August Sander: People of the 20th Century, Galerie Julian Sander, 2024
‘August Sander’s Open Work’ is an essay commissioned for a publication coinciding with an extensive presentation of Sander’s portrait project People of the 20th Century at ParisPhoto, November 2024.
August Sander’s Open Work
David Campany
August Sander’s epic People of the 20th Century is often described as a typological study of the German people, which would imply a somewhat rigorous and cold method in its making. While there is something of this in Sander’s adoption of societal positions as his organising principle, the portrait photographs themselves feel far from systematic. Each one is the result of a unique experience between the photographer and those he photographed. Each has its own nuance, its own aesthetic charge, and its own sense of what a portrait can be. Sander’s work would be less rich in possibility, and far less enduring if he had imposed a tight system (photographing as if for a medical institution or police department, for example). Instead, what we find as we move between the project as a whole and each image in particular, is a series of unresolvable but generative tensions: between social structures and individuality, between outward appearance and inner life, between portraits as artworks and documents, and between a rigid social order and something much less stable. (Of course, it is not lost on any of us that Sander was working at a time of tumultuous change.)
While People of the 20th Century is now among the most canonical projects in the history of photography, this does not guarantee any consensus about its meaning. It remains a touchstone because its significance cannot be fixed or foreclosed. We can agree upon the importance of the work but not upon its interpretation. This is why it continues to be so keenly debated and written about to this day. Indeed, People of the 20th Century has become a case study in the ways a body of photographs can renew itself across time and across cultural contexts.
Some years ago, I was giving a talk at a school of art and design in London.[i] The school had had no specific photography programme, although most of the students engaged with the medium in one way or another. I arrived a little early and visited the library. There, I found a heavily used copy the grand book of Sander’s project, featuring 431 images, published in 1986.[ii] It looked like an old and well-thumbed telephone directory. Who at this school was so interested in it? I asked a librarian. The book had been borrowed most often by fashion students. I was surprised, then embarrassed at my surprise. Sander’s work is bound to lend itself to a great range of interests, far beyond the world of ‘Photography’, capital ‘P’. Fashion students have as much of a claim to it as anyone. Nevertheless, could we ever know exactly what a fashion student gets from these photographs? It may be information about how Germans dressed in the early decades of the last century, but it may be other things to do with the histories of gesture and posing, or the appearance of fabric when photographed in black and white, or something much more indeterminate.
In 1929, Sander published a sample of sixty of his portraits as the book Antlitz der Zeit [Face of the Time].[iii] We can imagine Germans measuring the images against their own experiences, and their own varied conception of themselves in that complex historical moment. Sander’s work was a contribution, perhaps even an intervention into the conflicted idea of modern national and European identity. Even so, we have no real idea who was buying the book or what they made of it. Of course, as time passes, images cannot be measured against experience so readily, and they run the risk of being slipped into the role of a simplified substitute for the past. Perhaps any photograph has a greater chance of becoming an authoritative document as it ages, but in important ways Sander’s project has proved resistant to this.
Two of the most significant essays on photography from the inter-war era responded to Sander’s first publication. In ‘The Reappearance of Photography’ (Hound & Horn, October 1931), the American Walker Evans noted: “Antlitz der Zeit is more than a book of “type studies”; a case of the camera looking in the right direction among people. This is one of the futures of photography foretold by [Eugène] Atget. It is a photographic editing of society, a clinical process; even enough of a cultural necessity to make one wonder why other so called advanced countries of the world have not also been examined and recorded.” In ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ (‘Little History of Photography’) published across three issues of Die Literarische Welt (18 and 25 September, and 2 October, 1931), Walter Benjamin wrote:
Works like Sander’s can accrue an unexpected topicality overnight. Shifts in power, such as have become due in our land, foster training and make the sharpening of the physiognomic perception of vital necessity. Whether people come from the Left or the Right, they will have to get used to being inspected for signs of provenance. And they will in turn have to scrutinise others. Sander’s work is more than a picture book: it is an atlas of exercises.[iv]
It is notable that Evans and Benjamin do not refer to ‘art’ and in fact neither were much concerned with photography’s status or acceptability as an art form. If photography could make itself significant in an intelligent and critical way, that would be more than enough. The art part could be left to take care of itself. What made photography truly modern by the 1920s, particularly in book form, was that it existed at the free intersection of so many discourses and frames of reference. Since the medium had penetrated almost every sphere of society – from art and design to sociology, biology, ethnography, anthropology, psychology, journalism, politics and more – Sander’s work could be read through the prism of any number of them, and simultaneously, in unpredictable ways. In belonging to no particular context but invoking so many, a book of photographs could dramatize this sense of radical possibility and make it an interpretive challenge. This would require a reader/viewer willing to spend some time with the work, rather than trying to consume it quickly, as with an illustrated magazine.
The German version of the Sander book I had seen in that London art school appears in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire (1987). Two angels are wandering the divided city of Berlin. Unseen by the living they watch as the citizens go about lives, caught between the upheavals of the past and the uncertain future. In the grand Staatsbibliothek an old man is seated at a reading desk looking through the book, an invisible angel at his shoulder. The man is old enough to have been one of the three young farmers on their way to a dance in 1914, who can be seen in the much-loved image on the book’s cover. As he looks at the portraits, he ruminates on the nature of history and his own life, and we are given to see Sander’s work not as an uncomplicated record but as a set of images to be read in open dialogue with their original time and with the contemporary moment. “What is wrong with peace that its inspiration does not endure and that its story is hardly told?” the man asks himself. Wenders cuts briefly to old newsreel footage of the human carnage left by a wartime bombing raid. The generations caught up in that conflict are fast dying out and direct experience of it has all but disappeared from our culture. But in this brief and simple scene, of a man weighing the pictures against his past and present life, something of the eternally provisional nature of Sander’s project, its speculative and inconclusive power, is permitted to surface.
As I watch that scene of turning pages, with one image replaced by the next and the next, I wonder: what is the relation between individual pictures and the full extent of a photographic project? In 1951, Sander wrote to a friend:
A successful photo is only a preliminary step toward the intelligent use of photography. …I would very much like to show my work again, but I cannot show it in a single photo, nor in two or three, after all, they could just as well be snapshots. Photography is like a mosaic that becomes a synthesis only when it is presented en masse.[v]
Even though his images are extraordinary (and much more than ‘snapshots’), we can understand this resistance to showing them individually. Yet, this does beg the question of how photography ‘en masse’ is actually looked at and engaged with. Is it a matter of taking in many individual images and allowing the impressions to accumulate? Is it a matter of suspending response to (or judgment of) a single image and deferring instead to the totality? Is the autonomy and ‘composition’ of each image to be subsumed in the heteronomy and composition of the whole oeuvre?
Perhaps the enigmatic mental path we take between the one and the many is a special form of montage. Conventionally, montage is understood as a rejection of the single photograph in favour of a synthetic combination of fragments (think of the political photomontages John Heartfield was producing while Sander was making his portraits). However, in their number and sequence images can be made to modify and modulate each other. They appear as single works and as elements of a larger whole. This is something Walker Evans carried forward in his first book American Photographs(1938), and you can see the debt to Antlitz der Zeit. Like Sander, Evans was also keen that whatever individuality his photographs possessed should be seen in relation to the wider presentation (the dustjacket of his book even carried a warning: “These photographs are arranged to be seen in their given sequence. They demand and should receive the slight flattery of your closest attention.”)
Essentially, there are two ways to edit images: the sequence and the set or album. Sander’s project belongs to the latter. While his social categories and subcategories were vital, it appears he had no strict image-by-image sequence in mind, although most presentations default to chronology. Beyond the page, what about the space of exhibition? Small groupings? A single line? Distinct grids? A total grid? If the whole project cannot be shown, by what criteria should the images be selected? I have known August Sander’s work for many years and have seen various configurations of it on the walls of galleries and museums. Each has had its own merits. What is important, however, is that the principles of the project are honoured while allowing its essential generosity to be an invitation to new audiences and new interpretations. While People of the 20th Century emerged from a specific time and place, its unpredictable and open significance continues.
[i] I first recounted this incident in ‘Yesterday’s Everyday and the Depiction of Work’, in Sergio Mah. ed., The Everyday, PhotoEspana, 2009.
[ii] August Sander, Citizens of the Twentieth Century: Portrait Photographs 1992-1952, MIT Press, 1986.
[iii] August Sander, Antlitz der Zeit, sechwig aufnahmen deutscher Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts, Transmare Verlag, Kurt Wolf Verlag, 1929.
[iv] Walter Benjamin, ‘Small History of Photography’ (1931), in Ester Leslie, ed., and trans., On Photography, Reaktion Books, 2015, p. 87.
[v] August Sander, Letter to Abelen, Jan. 16, 1951, cited by Ulrich Keller in August Sander: Citizens of the Twentieth Century Portrait Photographs 1892-1952, MIT Press, 1986, p. 36.