Typologies, one of Tate Modern’s current exhibitions, takes the work of German photographer August Sander as its theme. Sander’s major work, People of the Twentieth Century (Menschen des 20.Jahrhunderts), spread over most of his working life. As well as being a fascinating record of social history it tests and explores photography’s unique characteristics, its capacity to repeat similar images quickly like a riff in a song and to capture, almost extract, precise moments from time.
Sander conceived a project to record German society, from aristocrats to the unemployed and destitute. To this end he began taking photos around the time of the First World War and continued into the 1950s, amassing around 600 images that he divided into seven categories including Skilled Tradesman, The Woman, Artists, and The City. It’s a huge work not only of photography but of collecting, categorising and ordering – one man’s attempt to understand the society around him.
The Tate have chosen around 100 of Sander’s photos pretty much all pre-dating the Second World War and anchored in the period that saw the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. In this time of upheaval, excitement and fear Sander’s photos almost seem to rescue their subjects, giving them a moment to pause, step aside from the whirlwind and consider who they are or, more to the point, what this particular time and society permits them to be.
Given the wide social range of Sander’s subjects often the only thing uniting them is their moment in front of his camera. His Rural Bride (1920-1925) with a wreath of wild flowers round her head could be part of the cast of a Bruegel painting. She hardly seems to occupy the same century as the Secretary at West German Radio (1931) who leans away from the camera, cigarette in hand, all edgy slenderness and precision cut hair.
One of Sander’s stated aims was to observe all his subjects “with the same neutral distance”. This belief in neutrality as something desirable and attainable seems naïve in our more cynical times. Sander’s ‘neutrality’ falls off him like an old coat as he chooses and arranges his subjects, even giving some of them rather romantic titles which he obviously felt reflected their personalities – a family of farmers includes a philosopher, sage and fighter or revolutionary.
The important word to focus on with regard to Sander’s work isn’t neutral but distance. His portraits have a sense of space, a feeling that they are a collaboration between subject and photographer. What Sander achieves for his twentieth century people, many of them trapped in an economic slump between two world wars, is not neutrality but a moment at least of equality.
Whatever his aims Sander’s portraits did not find favour with the Nazis who seized and destroyed the printing plates of some of his work that had been published in 1929 as Face of Our Time (Antlitz der Zeit). This political interference shows how Sander’s huge project had become not only a record of German society but an expression of his own life and beliefs and those of his family too. Erich, Sander’s son, was imprisoned by the Nazis for his political activities and died in captivity in 1944. Sander’s photo of his son’s death mask has a dream-like quality that is only reinforced when you discover that for most of the Second World War Sander closed his camera to the human face and took landscape pictures, a genre less likely to irritate Nazi sensibilities. Erich’s serene, ghostly features – he seems to be smiling slightly – act as a memory of portraits taken and a hope for better times to come.
What Sander shares with the Nazis and many other photographers too is an acute appreciation of the power and importance of symbols. His picture of a rather stout young National Socialist with his hair groomed into a jaunty little wave is anchored by the Nazi insignia the man wears ever so discreetly by his shirt cuff. Just as your eyes are about to slide off the image and on to the next photo they’re hooked by that little crooked cross and the picture readjusts itself in your mind and takes on another layer of meaning.
One of the aims of this exhibition is to show how Sander’s work has influenced other photographers. Gathered around his work are pictures by photographers which are the result of a particular theme being recorded, repeated, categorised and organised. Interestingly most of these pictures don’t focus on people but fall roughly into the landscape category, recording scenes from Europe’s industrial architecture to domestic interiors in south east Asia. The time frames and the parameters each photographer set for their work vary widely – Simryn Gill took her photos of homes in Malaysia in two months in 2001 whilst Bernd and Hilla Becher’s pictures of collieries and coal bunkers stretch over decades. Gill used a tightly naturalistic approach, always shooting at eye level in natural light and never cropping or editing in contrast to Alexander Apostol’s digitally altered images of modernist buildings in Caracas.
Looking at the work of Sander’s successors with their very precise themes serves to emphasise the range of his ambition and his optimism about what photography could achieve as he set out to capture a whole nation on film. Contained within his portraits are all those issues that continue to fascinate and frighten us – class structures, the impact of war and economic uncertainty, the role of women, the change from rural to urban lifestyles. The world still remains caught in Sander’s curious gaze.
Typologies runs at Tate Modern until March 2011
|A book is also available – August Sander: People of the 20th Century: A cultural work of photographs divided into seven groups, revised and newly compiled by Susanne Lange, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Gerd Sander, 7 volumes. Ed. Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002
Image: Rural Bride © Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv Koln/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn & DACS London 2010
