Published by Steidl/Shoah Memorial/August Sander Foundation. Text by Barbara Becker-Jákli, Gabriele Betancourt, Johann Chapoutot, Alfred Döblin, Werner Jung, Olivier Lugon, Sophie Nagiscarde, Gerhard Sander, Alain Sayag.
A founding father of the documentary style, August Sander is the creator of many iconic 20th-century photographs. Toward the end of World War I, while working from his studio in Cologne, Sander began what would become his life's work: a photographic portrait of German society under the Weimar Republic. He called this endeavor People of the 20th Century. While his first publication was banned from sale in 1936 by the Nazi government, around 1938 Sander began taking identity photographs for persecuted Jews. During World War II he photographed migrant workers; Sander included these images, alongside some taken by his son Erich from the prison where he would die in 1944, plus portraits of National Socialists made before and during the war, in People of the 20th Century.
Sander was unable to publish his monumental work during his lifetime, and these photographs are published together for the first time here, along with contact prints, letters and details about the lives of those photographed. They are portraits of dignified men and women, victims of an ideology taking their rightful place as "People of the 20th Century" in defiance of Nazi efforts to ostracize them.
The son of a miner from Herdorf, Germany, August Sander (1876–1964) moved to Cologne in 1910 and established a studio as a portrait photographer there. In 1929 he published Antlitz der Zeit (Face of our time), a collection of 60 portraits constituting a sociological inventory of German society in the 1920s, which the Nazis eventually banned. In 1938–39 Sander took numerous identity photographs for Jews in Cologne; after the war he added 12 of these to his oeuvre under the title The Persecuted. Sander died in 1964, leaving behind a chronicle and sociological inventory of his time in more than 40,000 photos.
Published by Aperture. Photographs by August Sander.
In 1918, August Sander meticulously photographed the defeated citizenry of Germany who needed photo identification cards for the occupying forces. By 1929 he had photographed all classes and types of people. During this time, Sander came under the influence of modern art and its intellectual practitioners whom he befriended in Cologne. Through his discussions with them he came to understand the importance of his portrait work and was encouraged to continue. He produced the first volume of an extended series he hoped would provide an exhaustive catalogue, but in the 1930s his work fell into disfavor and was banned by the Nazis. The photography of August Sander comprises an extraordinary human document. This volume of the Masters of Photography series, which includes 43 portraits of a cross section of German society, from pastry chefs to industrialists, is a provocative glance at the Weimar Republic.
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8 x 8 in. / 96 pgs / 43 reproductions throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION Contact Publisher
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893817480TRADE List Price: $12.50 CDN $15.00
NEW YORK Showroom by Appointment Only 75 Broad Street, Suite 630 New York NY 10004 Tel 212 627 1999
LOS ANGELES Showroom by Appointment Only
818 S. Broadway, Suite 700 Los Angeles, CA 90014 Tel. 323 969 8985
ARTBOOK LLC D.A.P. | Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.
All site content Copyright C 2000-2017 by Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. and the respective publishers, authors, artists. For reproduction permissions, contact the copyright holders.
