August Sander’s Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World

Still, objectivity is never really objective, and the camera’s putatively clinical perspective had long been used by eugenicists to peddle hateful pseudoscience about the skull sizes and brow shapes of “criminal types” and so-called lesser races. (This history is largely absent from Yale’s admirable just-the-art, ma’am, presentation, curated by Judy Ditner.) Yet Sander’s pictures rarely evince any suggestion of genetic essence or ideal. Despite his claims to universality, Sander thought with his eye, which was attracted to abnormal bodies, unforgettable faces, unkempt free thinkers, and all sorts of people the Nazis would soon label “unerwünscht,” or undesirable. Reassuringly, “Face of our Time,” a sixty-photo series published in 1929, was condemned by one right-wing critic as “a physiognomic document of anarchy and inferior instincts.” The regime later destroyed some of Sander’s printing plates and burned his books.

At the same time, Sander’s project was too personal to be purely political. He sliced society up into seven not quite self-evident categories—the Farmer, Classes and Professions, the Skilled Tradesman, the Artists, the City, the Woman, and the Last People—and at the Yale show each of them gets a wall. The categories are subdivided into smaller, more specific portfolios, and the effect is a kind of social levelling, a carnival through classification. The City, for example, includes the German President Paul von Hindenburg, passing by in a motorcar, as well as circus folk and Roma and a regal Turkish mousetrap salesman who might have been painted by Goya. In the nineteen-thirties, Sander added portfolios of political prisoners, as well as portraits of Jews, many of whom would soon perish in the Holocaust. (Violence is present in Sander’s project only by implication.) In the portfolio “Types and Figures of City,” Sander even inserts a headshot of himself in a black jacket and floppy bow tie, looking like an affable Dracula.