SANDER, AUGUST
Publié le 22/02/2012
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SANDER, AUGUST (1876–1964), photographer; documented the face of the
German people in photographs. He was born near Cologne in the village of
Herdorf; his father did carpentry in the region's mines. Destined for a mining
career, he received his first camera in 1892 and, with his father's help, built a
darkroom and began taking photographs. While he was in the army (1896–
1898), he apprenticed at a studio in Trier. After some freelance work he studied
at the Dresden Kunstakademie and then took a position in 1901 at a studio in
Linz. In 1902, with a coworker, he purchased the studio; two years later he
bought out his partner and founded the August Sander Atelier. His work earned
him fortune (quickly squandered) and fame. In 1904 he received a gold medal
at the Paris Exposition, and in 1906 he staged a solo exhibition at the Landhaus
Pavilion in Linz.
Soon after selling his Linz studio in 1910, Sander settled in the Cologne
suburb of Lindenthal. While he was photographing peasants in the Westerwald,
he conceived his principal enterprise: a series of five hundred to six hundred
documentary photographs revealing his subjects in their natural setting. His
Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (translated as Men without Masks), finally published
in 1980, was largely based on photographs taken in the Weimar era. Due
to Nazi opposition, it never achieved its projected magnitude; however, it did
capture, with rare purity, the face of the German people in the first third of the
century.
A reservist, Sander was inducted in 1914. He continued his photography while
on duty, was conscripted at war's end to do identity photos, and then resumed
his massive chronicle. He succumbed to the influence of Cologne's progressive
culture, and his work became truly pioneering in the postwar era. Still seeking
people from all walks of life, he jettisoned a prewar romantic hue to record the
more disturbing character of German reality. Upon seeing sixty photos at a 1927
Cologne Kunstverein exhibition, Kurt Wolff* offered Sander a contract. The
initial three volumes, appearing in 1929 as Antlitz der Zeit (Face of our time),
were introduced by Alfred Do¨blin.* In 1931 Sander delivered a popular radio
series entitled ‘‘The Nature and Development of Photography.''
The Third Reich was a calamity for Sander. His work so irritated the NSDAP
that both Antlitz der Zeit and the plates used for its publication were seized and
destroyed. Sander's son Erich, a member of the KPD, was arrested and eventually
died in a concentration camp. Finally, the artist was compelled from 1935
to focus on landscape and nature studies. Although his pre-1933 photos were
again exhibited in the 1950s, the magnitude of his achievement was not appreciated
until after his death.
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