August Sander

August Sander's vast portrait project People of the Twentieth Century grew in part from the prestige that physiognomy still held in early twentieth-century Germany. If profession, social class, and living conditions left their marks on the body and face, then perhaps portrait photography could make social structure visible through appearance itself. Repeatedly photographing farmers in the Westerwald deepened Sander's conviction that society could be mapped through faces^*1. He organized the project into seven broad groups - peasants, skilled trades, women, classes and professions, artists, the city, and the last people - envisioning an anthropological archive composed of hundreds of portraits. Its first major public form was Face of Our Time in 1929, a book of forty-five images whose preface by Alfred Doblin described it as sociology without words^*2. Sander's cold clarity placed him near the painters of New Objectivity, such as Otto Dix and George Grosz, who likewise approached Weimar society without sentimentality^*3. In that context, his portraits suggested the possibility of a nonjudgmental, unsentimental social record. The Nazi regime later targeted the project: copies of Face of Our Time were seized and destroyed in 1934, and glass negatives were confiscated or damaged, partly through pressure connected to the anti-Nazi activities of his son Erich, who later died in prison^*4. Sander survived the war, but the 1946 fire in his Cologne studio destroyed still more material. In the 1950s and 1960s figures such as John Szarkowski at MoMA helped restore his reputation, recognizing him as a pioneer who showed how portraiture could function as social testimony; later critics have traced his influence forward to Diane Arbus and to the systematic typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher^*5. His claim that the photographer must be a witness to society rather than a maker of pictures continues to serve as a concise ethical statement for documentary practice^*6.