At the Paris photography fair, for the first time in Europe, the great work of August Sander (1876-1964) will be presented in its entirety: Men of the XXmy century, 619 photographs taken from 1892 a 1954. The set, divided into seven chapters and forty-six folders, was intended to be a representative sample of German society at the most turbulent moment in its history: between the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi horror.
The prints were made in the 90s by Gerd Sander, the photographer’s grandson, and will be offered in their entirety at the Julian Sander, great-grandson’s gallery stand, for an amount of several million euros. You can also discover them in an app, Collekton.
Some icons are best known for this wildly ambitious work, including a trio of young peasants dressed in their Sunday best on their way to the ball. This is the opportunity to discover less famous images and, above all, to take the measure, or rather the excess, of this encyclopedic project that August Sander worked on all his life and never finished.
“Like a mosaic”
The German, who began as a traveling photographer, could have been content to be a talented portrait painter, immortalizing artists, peasants or notable people in their homes, on the street or in his studio. But after linking up with artists from the Cologne Progressive group in the 1920s, he brought together their portraits into a conceptual and pioneering work.
Your ambition? Develop a typology of German society, in seven major chapters: the peasant, the profession, the woman, the notables, the artists, the big city, the abandoned. Presented in this way, each image stops being the portrait of an individual and becomes an archetype, characterized by clothing, an attitude, a hairstyle: pastry chef, nun, school teacher, soldier… “I can’t show [mon œuvre] in a single photo, or even in two or three, said August Sander in 1951. Photography is like a mosaic, which only becomes a synthesis when presented en masse. »
In this venture, Sander seems to have put one foot in the past and the other in the future. If he places the peasants at the center, who for him are the heart of German society, and presents women more as wives, he also captures the modernity of the Weimar Republic and the desire for emancipation of its contemporary people: a secretary with. a pixie cut, a politician…
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