AUGUST SANDER: CITIZENS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: Portrait Photographs 1892-1952

by Gunther--Ed. Sander ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 30, 1986

When August Sander, the long-overlooked German photographer, died in 1964, he left his masterwork, Citizens of the Twentieth Century, incomplete and unpublished. Now, Gunther Sander has assembled 431 of his father's portrait studies to produce a work that reveals in stark, unsparing images the face of the German nation from 1892 to 1952. It is a monumental undertaking, brilliantly realized. Over the years August Sander sought to put together a comprehensive record of typical members of the various strata of German society--farmers, craftsmen, the middle class, artists, aristocrats, servants, itinerants, children, Nazi functionaries, Jews--assembling thousands of negatives in the process. It was from this vast storehouse of material Gunther Sander drew the present re-creation of his father's proposed work. After the establishment of the Third Reich, the elder Sander's activities were curtailed. In 1934, his album, Face of the Time, was burned by the Nazi Bureau of Fine Arts, presumably because it failed to support the regime's contention that German society was culturally homogeneous and racially pure. From all indications, Sander was not interested in promoting political or ideological theories with his photographs. The portraits he produced make little immediate appeal to the emotions. There is, in fact, more than a hint of Brechtian ""alienation"" in the subjects' confrontations with the viewer. Remarkably straightforward in their use of carefully composed, generally frontal poses and available light, they nonetheless reward repeated study with growing involvement and insight. Discussion and reflection were the responses Sander sought. In his thorough, well-organized and smoothly written introductory text, art historian Ulrich Keller comments not only on Sander's life and art but also on the photographers and painters whose works and theories influenced the German master. Especially interesting are Keller's analyses of Sander's impact on such international photographers as Paul Strand and Diane Arbus (the older man's ""distancing"" from his subjects was put to effective use by both). Despite this unrelenting objectivity, however, in many of the portraits of persecuted Jews, all taken in 1938, it is next to impossible not to read foreboding in the passive faces. After nearly 50 years, Sander's power to provoke ""discussion and reflection"" is undiminished.

Pub Date: June 30, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: MIT Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION