August Sander: ‘Every person’s story is written plainly on his face’

Sander organised his pictures into seven groups and 49 sub-groups. He photographed cleaners, bankers, beggars, politicians, artists, circus workers. The idea was that no subject would be accompanied by their name or title – they would simply represent archetypes. To preserve this idea, the backgrounds were kept neutral and often dark, but the photos were also frequently taken outdoors, lending a flavour of the sitter’s natural environment. At a time when celluloid was widely available and amateur photographers abounded, Sander – who was a conventional studio photographer by profession – opted to use a large-format view camera.

Indeed, People of the 20th Century was as much an artistic shift as a sociological pursuit. Rebelling against his own work (primarily cartes de visite and headshots for identity cards, though he also won medals for his pictorialist-style art photographs), Sander jettisoned the fuzzy gum bichromate prints then in fashion, in favour of glossy paper designed for technical photographs. His prints were so strikingly precise that they were seen by his artist friends as radical. Sander dubbed this new, social-scientific method “exact photography”.

The results were consistently strange. Writing about them much later, Arbus described Sander’s subjects as “absolute and immutable”, yet they were also so unlike each other that they resisted the very notion of “type” that they were designed to illustrate. “Every person’s story is written plainly on his face,” Sander himself declared, “though not everyone can read it.” That slippery remark shows the ambiguity with which the project is fraught.

Of the many extraordinary portraits in Sander’s collection, two from the final volume might be twinned to tell a story. One is a portrait of a dead person: Erich Sander, the photographer’s son, who died in prison in 1944 and is represented in the form of a death mask. The other is from 1937, and shows an SS officer, standing on a bridge with an ornate Gothic cathedral in the background. He’s smiling, sort of, like a friendly neighbourhood policeman.

The reason these two might be put together is that there’s a kind of gap in Sander’s project. These twinned images don’t quite answer the question but there’s a chance they could reframe it. The gap is this: though Sander’s work was ultimately confiscated by the Nazis, was its rigid taxonomic premise not something that they would, in different circumstances, have admired?

The span of Sander’s categories may eliminate judgment – he photographed blind people and Jews and artists the Nazis considered “degenerates”, as well as SS officers – yet there remains something hierarchical about it, and the overlap between this kind of physiognomic thinking and the long-discredited 19th century views of Francis Galton and Cesare Lombroso can feel uncomfortable. Supposing he’d only published the earliest portraits of farmers? Could they not have been co-opted as heroic German types?

In his home life Sander was an intemperate, conservative figure, and Cologne, where his family lived, was a “brown” city, with a population that strongly supported National Socialism (unlike Berlin, where, at that point, most elected officials were liberal). So the smiling SS officer makes you wonder. The question is not one of blame but of squaring the personal with the political: the sense in which Sander himself was a person of the 20th century.

By the time the photograph of the SS chief was taken, Erich had been arrested for his Communist activities. Though August Sander disagreed with his son’s political beliefs, he helped him print Communist leaflets, and left them drying on the roof. When a gust of wind blew them into the courtyard, they were discovered by the Nazis. At that point, Sander had published one book, Face of Our Time, which had been praised by the then-new Nobel laureate Thomas Mann. All copies were confiscated, along with the printing blocks, so it couldn’t be reissued. Sander lost clients through fear, and moved with his family to the countryside, hiding 40,000 negatives in his Cologne basement, of which 30,000 were later destroyed in a fire.

His younger son, Gunther, was posted to the Eastern Front, but survived. Sander began to take landscape photographs. Before Erich died, he was able to correspond with him in prison, and they developed a new taxonomic project: Erich would research German plants, and his father would photograph them.

This innocuous attempt to impose order might also be seen as a trial of hope. Some of the species Erich identified were erroneously considered extinct. As the war progressed and their country began to fall apart, Sander planted seeds of flowers that were no longer supposed to exist, and grew them privately, in the absence of his subjects and his sons.

August Sander: Men Without Masks is at Hauser and Wirth, London W1 until Jul 28. Details: hauser wirth.com