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 pub-lished 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 Döblin.* 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 even-tually 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 appre-ciated until after his death.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; International Center of Pho-tography, Encyclopedia; August Sander, August Sander; Gunther Sander, August Sander.