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Photographer August Sander: the truth doesn’t fade with time..

At this year’s Fashion and Style in Photography Biennial, the Multimedia Art Museum showed the famous August Sander. Some spectators were perplexed: “What does Zander have to do with fashion and style”? A possible answer to this question: Zander is such a major, systematic figure in the history of photography that he obviously has everything to do with the world.

We thank the Multimedia Art Museum for provided photos for publication.

Photo equipment

August Sander. Notary, 1924

Printed by Gunter Sander in 1980.

&copy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne RAO, New York, 2013

The winners of the Galerie Priska Pasquer Cologne

Zander’s pictures are full of details, interesting to look at. You can use them to judge fashion, material culture, to read body language, to interpret facial expressions endlessly, to ponder on characters and destinies. Economy, morals, psychology, lifestyle and living conditions, comfort and prosperity, poverty and illness, carelessness and concern, narcissism and timidity, the individual and the group – Sander’s photographs contain many objects for study and interpretation.

Fashion and style were also among them. The viewer can expect art to satisfy different emotional and aesthetic needs, the artist’s work can delight, scandalize or leave indifferent, but with Zander we are dealing not with emotions but with information. Information presented objectively is always valuable, regardless of one’s opinions or preferences.

The first half of the twentieth century was a time when photography was charting the course of its future development. The flowering of the illustrated press contributed to the development of the principles of reportage – a vivid and compelling account of events and personalities. The avant-garde proposed to look at usual things from a new angle, from a perspective, in a way no one had thought to look before except the photographer who with his small-format camera moves in the rhythm of modern life – up, down and diagonally.

The American purists of the f/64 group were asserting new canons of beauty – purely photographic, not accepting the standards of painting and sculpture, but not contradicting them fundamentally. Photography was looking for and finding itself, its own special language, philosophy, and relationship to reality and symbol. Zander tried to get from photography what they considered its inherent quality in the XIX century: clinical, protocol objectivity.

Photographic technique

August Sander. Artist Anton Raderscheidt and his wife, Martha Hegemann, circa 1925

Printed by Gunter Sander in 1974.

&copy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne RAO, New York, 2013

The Galerie Priska Pasquer Cologne

August Sander’s Opus Magnum, the project “People of the 20th Century,” covers the late 1910s and early 1930s. He set out to explore the German people through photography – to compile a complete catalog of his contemporaries “according to the existing social order.”. Sander divided the whole of German society into seven groups, a very idiosyncratic division that seeks to reflect all possible approaches: professional, class, family, cultural, etc. p. Peasant, Artisan, Woman, Estates and Professions, Art Workers, Big City and Last People.

Among the individuals photographed by Sander there are quite a few well-known figures of art, culture and public life, but the photographer gives no names, but signs the photos according to the principles of classification he chose: a widower with two children, a chemist, a vagabond, a stalker, the architect’s wife.

Its characters were not specific individuals, but representatives of species, classes and genera. If a photographer captures reality as honestly and impartially as possible, without trying to improve anything, to emphasize or direct interpretation, just to show everything as it is – photography will be the perfect tool for contemporaries and descendants to draw conclusions about the state of humanity at a certain point in history. Both the people as a whole and its individual representatives.

“Photography can convey reality in all its beauty, without hiding the sometimes appalling truth, but it can also deceive in the most cruel way. We must learn to see the truth, reveal it to our contemporaries and pass it on to the next generations, whether we benefit from it or not. Perhaps I, as a sane person, am too bold to see things as they are and not as they should be, but I hope for forgiveness because I cannot do otherwise.”

The photographic technique

August Sander. Secretary at the West German Radio in Cologne, 1931

Printed by Gunter Sander in 1979.

&copy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne RAO, New York, 2013

The Priska Galerie Pasquer Cologne

In the history of photography, Sander’s heirs are traditionally called the masters of the next generations, whose work combines an analysis of the individual and the archetypal. Most of the time it’s about portraiture, but not only. Diane Arbus is usually mentioned among them, but in my opinion Arbus is related to Zander perhaps only in her desire to describe a certain phenomenon, but this description is not objective, but quite the opposite.

Susan Sontag said that Arbus obviously has a certain authorial position, which he conveys through his portraits. Zander’s position, on the other hand, is that there is no position, or at least that it is not visible in any way. The vocation of photography, according to Sander, is to provide an objective picture from which objective conclusions can be drawn.

Uncompromising objectivity can be a problem. Honesty and straightforwardness can be disadvantageous. In the case of Zander this became clear very quickly, after the Nazis had forbidden the continuation of the project without explanation and tried to seize what had already been realized.

A veritable continuation of Zander we see in contemporary conceptualists whose impassioned, unemotional, protocolistic and boring series often leave the untrained viewer bewildered and irritated. Masters of the DĂŒsseldorf School, landscape photographers depicting banal urban spaces, portraitists such as the famous master Rineke Deikstra. If you remove the author’s voice and let the chosen objects speak freely, they will begin to speak for themselves. And it is the photography that will allow them to be heard.

Photographic technique

August Sander. Circus Workers, 1926-1932

Printed by Gunther Sander in 1982.

&copy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne RAO, New York, 2013

The Galerie Priska Pasquer Cologne

Photography can reveal what cannot be revealed in any other way than through the creation of a visual catalog, registry, typologies. Analysing the collected material, one can see the invisible and draw conclusions. On similarities and differences, on structures and regularities. It is therefore important to cover as much of the material as possible and describe the whole phenomenon in detail. “A successful shot represents only a preliminary step on the road to intelligent use of photography. A picture or two or three is not enough for me, a picture is like a mosaic, it only achieves an analytical quality when it is presented in mass.

Sander and his followers are not concerned with beauty, good and evil – they are interested in truth. The question of whether photography objectively reflects reality is the eternal question of photography. The prevailing view among philosophers and analysts has long been that photographic objectivity is impossible: any photograph taken by a human being is always an interpretation and a culturally conditioned product. Sander at the beginning of the century still tried to get closer to the truth, despite the apparent futility of his efforts. We will not know the whole truth about ourselves. But we can keep trying.

Photo equipment

August Sander. View on Nonnenwerth Island, 1930

&copy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne RAO, New York, 2013

Galerie Priska Pasquer Cologne

Photo equipment

August Zander. Confectioner, 1928

Printed by Gunther Sander in 1979.

&copy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne RAO, New York, 2013

From Galerie Priska Pasquer Cologne

Photo Technique

August Sander. The Artist Gottfried Brockmann , 1924

Printed by Gunther Sander in 1980.

&copy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne RAO, New York, 2013

By Galerie Priska Pasquer Cologne

Photographic equipment

August Sander. Raoul Hausmann as a dancer, 1929

Printed by Gunter Sander in 1974.

&copy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne RAO, New York, 2013

From Galerie Priska Pasquer Cologne

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John Techno

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Comments: 3
  1. Piper

    What techniques did August Sander use to capture the truth in his photographs that have stood the test of time?

    Reply
  2. Juniper

    How were August Sander’s photographs able to retain the truth even after the passage of time?

    Reply
  3. Addison Jacobs

    What is it about August Sander’s photography that makes it timeless? How does he capture the essence of truth in his images?

    Reply
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