August sander archive

August sander famous photos
August sander young farmers
August sander photography

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Biography

Born in Herdorf-am-der-Sieg, August Sander received his first camera from an uncle in 1892 and promptly set up a darkroom and taught himself photography. After serving in the German military, he took up photography full-time. He established a photography studio, first in Austria, then in Cologne, where he settled in 1910 and made photographs of local peasants. This activity inspired his life's work--a comprehensive document of the German people entitled "Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts" (Citizens of the Twentieth Century). He worked on the project throughout the next two decades, while also producing photographs of architectural and industrial subjects. By the early 1930s, Sander was recognized as an authority on photography in Germany and delivered a series of popular radio lectures, "The Nature and Development of Photography." As Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s, Sander was forced to discontinue "Citizens of the Twentieth Century": his son (who died in prison in 1944) was a member of the Communist party, and this made Nazi officials suspicious of Sander's wo

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Exhibition Overview

Though it was never fully realized or adequately understood, August Sander's Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century) was intended as a comprehensive photographic index of the German population, classified into seven groups by social "type". Eighteen hundred portraits, made mostly in the 1920s and 1930s—150 of which are included in this exhibition—survive, as do Sander's notes and plans for the project, which provided the basis for its reconstruction in book and exhibition form by the August Sander Archiv in Cologne. Remarkable for their unflinching realism and deft analysis of character and lifestyle, Sander's individual images stand out as high points of photographic portraiture and collectively propose the idea of the archive as art.

The exhibition features a representative selection from each of Sander's categories and includes such now-iconic images as Pastrycook (1928), Young Farmers (1914), and Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne (1931).

The son of a carpenter, August Sander was born in 1876, in a farming

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Five things to know: August Sander

1. August Sander didn’t come from an artistic background

August Sander’s father was a mine carpenter and, later, the family ran a small plot of farmland. Sander first discovered photography at the local mine, while helping carry the equipment of a company photographer. His son Gunther said, that looking through a camera ‘transfixed him – and not just for that instant’. He spent his military service (1897–99) as a photographer's assistant and went on to set up his own photography studio in Cologne in 1909.

2. One of his projects lasted his whole career

In the mid-1920s, Sander began his highly ambitious project People of the 20th Century. In it, Sander aimed to document Germany by taking portraits of people from all segments of society. The project adapted and evolved continuously, falling into seven distinct groups: ‘The Farmer’, ‘The Skilled Tradesman’, ‘The Woman’, ‘Classes and Professions’, ‘The Artists’, ‘The City’ and ‘The Last People’.

Sander once said ‘The portrait is your mirror. It’s you’. He believed that, thro