AUGUST SANDER
				German, 1876-1964
		Website about the artist: no website
			Introduction
			August Sander was born and lived in Germany. He started his great project around 1910; his aim was to produce a kind of catalogue of representative types of German Society - 'Man in the Twentieth Century'. His portraits of individuals and small groups often show them in their working clothes and sometimes in their work environments, and are captioned by occupation - school-teacher, musician, student, farmer, peasant, baker, unemployed man... or sometimes by their relationships - twins, widower with sons. During military service, August Sander was an assistant in a photographic studio in Trier; he then spent the following two years working in various studios elsewhere. By 1904 he had opened his own studio in Linz, Austria, where he met with success. He moved to a suburb of Cologne in 1909 and soon began to photograph the rural farmers nearby. Around three years later Sander abandoned his urban studio in favor of photographing in the field, finding subjects along the roads he traveled by bicycle. "Man of the Twentieth Century" was Sander's monumental, lifelong photographic project to document the people of his native Westerwald, near Cologne. Stating that "[w]e know that people are formed by the light and air, by their inherited traits, and their actions. We can tell from appearance the work someone does or does not do; we can read in his face whether he is happy or troubled," Sander photographed subjects from all walks of life and created a typological catalogue of more than six hundred photographs of the German people. Sander's simple and straightforward approach allows us to study not the generalities of the subject implied by his classification, but their individualities. Given a peasant band we can see clearly the different approaches each performer has - one the serious musician, another apparently a simple peasant. The Nazi ideology stressed Aryan purity; Sander's work showed the German nation to be cosmopolitan and extremely varied with few exemplars that fitted their model. This was perhaps one reason why they burnt Sander's work, although he had also photographed many intellectuals and Jews. Although the Nazis banned the portraits in the 1930s because the subjects did not adhere to the ideal Aryan type, Sander continued to make photographs. After 1934 his work turned increasingly to nature and architectural studies.