August Sander

Photographer, born in Herdorf, WC Germany. He studied painting in Dresden, and opened studios in Linz and Cologne. For many years he planned and worked towards a documentary study, Men in the 20th Century. He published the first part, Faces of Our Times, in 1929, but his social realism was discouraged by the Nazi Ministry of Culture in 1934, and he published little thereafter. What little surviving material there is has provided penetrating portraits of German life in the early part of the century.

Sander was the son of a carpenter working in the mining industry. While working at a local mine, Sander first learned about photography by assisting a photographer who was working for the mining company.

In the early 1920s Sander joined the "Group of Progressive Artists" in Cologne and began plans to document contemporary society in a portrait series. In 1927 Sander and writer Ludwig Marthar traveled through Sardinia for three months, where he took around 500 photographs.

Sander's first book Face of our Time was published in 1929. It contains a selection of 60 portraits from his series People of the Twentieth Century. His son Erich, who was a member of the left wing Socialist Workers' Party (SAP), was arrested in 1934 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he died in 1944, shortly before the end of his sentence. Sander's book Face of our Time was seized in 1936 and the plates destroyed. During the subsequent decade, Sander's work focused primarily on nature and landscape photography.

Sander's work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is most well known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series People of the Twentieth Century. The series is divided into seven sections: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, The Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People (homeless persons, veterans, etc.).