August Sander German, 1876-1964

August Sander (1876–1964) set out to photograph an entire society. People of the 20th Century, the project that occupied him from the 1920s until his death, organized German society into groups according to occupation and social position—the farmer, the skilled tradesman, the woman, the professional, the artist, the city dweller, the last people—and photographed each sitter frontally, in their own clothes and surroundings, without flattery or condescension. It remains the most ambitious portrait of a nation ever attempted with a camera and established the foundation for photographic typology. Bernd and Hilla Becher took the structure of People of the 20th Century—a single subject revealed through an accumulation of examples—and applied it to industrial architecture. Benjamin Buchloh places Sander first among the sources of their practice, and through the Düsseldorf School his influence extends to Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, and Andreas Gursky. Sander himself described photography as a mosaic that becomes a synthesis only when presented en masse.

Born in Herdorf to a carpenter who worked in the mining industry, Sander learned photography while working at a local mine, assisting a photographer employed by the company. With financial help from an uncle, he purchased his own equipment. He worked as a photographer’s assistant during his military service, traveled throughout Germany for several years, joined a studio in Linz in 1901, became a partner the following year, and sole proprietor in 1904. In 1909, he moved to Cologne, where he established a portrait practice among the farmers of the Westerwald and the city’s intellectual and artistic circles.

In the early 1920s, Sander became associated with the Group of Progressive Artists in Cologne, an encounter that sharpened People of the 20th Century into a sociological project. He organized the work into seven groups and forty-five portfolios of twelve photographs each, beginning with the farmer as the foundation of society and ending with what he called the “last people”—the sick, the homeless, and the dying. Antlitz der Zeit, published in 1929 as Face of Our Time with a foreword by Alfred Döblin, presented sixty portraits as a sample of the larger project. In 1927, Sander traveled through Sardinia for three months with the writer Ludwig Mathar, making approximately five hundred photographs for a book that was never completed.

The Nazi years brought the project to a halt. His son Erich, a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, was arrested in 1934 and died in prison in 1944, shortly before the end of his sentence. Face of Our Time was seized in 1936, and its printing plates were destroyed. Around 1942, Sander left Cologne for the countryside, a move that ultimately saved much of his photographic archive. His studio was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1944, and approximately thirty thousand negatives stored in the cellar were lost in a fire in 1946. Sander died in Cologne in 1964.

Sander’s photographs are held by The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty, the Centre Pompidou, and Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur in Cologne, which houses the August Sander Archive. Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented his work in Photographer as Sculptor, Sculptor as Photographer (2025), In Sequence (2025), Summer Glow (2024), and REWIND (2021).