The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
August Sander · a typological portrait project, Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts, conceived at Cologne in the early to mid 1920s and worked at until the maker’s death in 1964, its portraits made from about 1910 (a few earlier) to the 1950s · large-format portrait photographs in daylight, printed in gelatin silver · published in his lifetime only in part, as Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time, 1929), sixty portraits with an introduction by Alfred Döblin · the unit scored is the portrait project as one body, the portraits Sander made and assigned to it under his own scheme of seven groups; Antlitz der Zeit and the best known images weighed most; the whole now seen in a posthumous edition of about six hundred images built from his plan
Mode
Typological portrait photography: the frontal, uniform, serial method of the type photograph turned on a whole modern society, by consent and in the sitter’s own role
Mythos
A cycle of the social world as a life: the farmer and the soil, then trade, the family, the estates and the arts, the city, and at the end the last people, the old, the sick and the dead
Phase
Conceived in the early to mid 1920s in the circle of the Cologne Progressives; portraits from about 1910 to the 1950s; sixty published in 1929 and the book suppressed under the National Socialist government; never completed or published whole in the maker’s lifetime
Presentation
Single portraits, large-format, gelatin silver, assigned to portfolios under seven groups; the book of sixty of 1929; the whole now seen in a posthumous edition of about six hundred images
Register
Sober and level by intent: plain daylight, frontal address, nothing heightened, rising in particular images to a grave, cold dignity
Scale
A nation’s estates and trades over forty years, one sitter or one small group to a frame, often at full length
Governing Proposition
From the 1920s until his death August Sander, a portrait photographer of Cologne, gathered his portraits into one project, People of the Twentieth Century: farmers, tradesmen, women, the classes and professions, artists, the city, and at the end the old, the sick, the mad and the dead. Every sitter faces the camera in his or her own clothes and role, in the same plain light, at the same distance, sharp and unflattered. The wager of the work is that a society carries its order on its bodies, that a camera can read the person and the social fact at once without caricature, and that the comparison of faces, set in a scheme, is itself the disclosure.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
August Sander (1876 to 1964), born at Herdorf in the Siegerland, kept a portrait studio in Cologne. In the early to mid 1920s, in the circle of the Cologne Progressives, with Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and Heinrich Hoerle, he conceived a project he called Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts, People of the Twentieth Century, and he worked at it until his death. It gathers portraits made from about 1910, a few earlier, to the 1950s. They are large-format photographs, made in daylight with the sitter usually facing the camera, standing or seated, in his or her own clothes and often at work or at home, and printed in gelatin silver.
The work scored is the portrait project as one body: the portraits Sander made and assigned to it, under his own scheme of seven groups. In outline the scheme runs from the farmer through the skilled tradesman, the woman, the classes and professions, the artists and the city, and ends with the last people: the old, the sick, the blind, the mad, the dying and the dead. The project was never completed or published whole in his lifetime. The one form of it fixed and published in the 1920s is Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time, 1929), sixty portraits with an introduction by Alfred Döblin, and it is weighed most, with the images the body most depends on.
Those images are named on this page by the descriptive English titles they commonly carry: Young Farmers (1914), Pastry Cook (1928), the Bricklayer (1928), the Unemployed Man (1928), the Secretary at West German Radio (1931), the painter Anton Räderscheidt, the Blind Children, the circus workers, and the late folders that take in the Nazi years: the persecuted, the political prisoners, his son Erich among them, and men in uniform. The whole is now seen in a posthumous edition of about six hundred images built from Sander’s plan, which stands as the form of what survives. His landscapes, his views of Cologne and his commercial studio work are context, and are not scored.
Movement II
Three young men in town suits and bowler hats are caught turning on a country road, the field behind them, on their way to a dance. They wear the clothes of the town on the ground of the country. The picture is the work’s disclosure in one frame: a society carries its order on its bodies, and estate, trade, class and history can be read in a stance, a collar, the fit of a coat. John Berger’s essay The Suit and the Photograph reads class from this picture and from the village band, and the reading holds. The face of a person in a given place and decade is at once an individual and a social fact, and the camera reads both without caricature.
The same strain between a person and the role the age assigns runs through the body. The Bricklayer bears his hod like a load-bearing column. The radio secretary sits with her cigarette and her cropped hair. The late folders disclose more, and darker: the persecuted and the men in uniform set down in the same frontal manner, the order turning on its own members. The Unconcealment stands at 8.6, held below the top because the type sometimes stands in for the person, and because the disclosure needs the scheme to be seen whole.
Elevation is rare, by design. The light is plain daylight, the sitter faces the lens, and nothing is heightened. Where it comes it is of one kind, a grave, cold dignity: the stillness of the farmers on their road, the monumentality of the bricklayer, as of a figure of labour from an old frieze, the quiet dread of the Blind Children and of a dead man among the last people. Across hundreds of pictures most give interest rather than transport, and The Sublime stands at 7.5, the lowest of the twelve. Migrant Mother, standing level at 8.4, holds The Sublime at 8.3 by gravity held still in one face; this body has such faces, scattered among many that do not ask to be lifted.
Movement III
The scheme is a myth of society. It begins with the farmer, man of the soil, as the root of the order, rises through trade, the family, the estates and the arts to the city, and ends with the last people, the old, the sick and the dead. It is a cycle of the social world as a life, from rooted origin to dissolution, and it bears the arrangement: the archetype is built, not evoked, at the level of the whole. Within it the types are archetypal figures, the mother, the craftsman, the beggar, the artist, and each picture remains a person on a given day.
But the myth is a scheme more than a lived pattern. The single images seldom carry the archetype from within, and the cycle is legible only to someone who reads the order of the portfolios, which few viewers see. The Archetypal Deep stands at 8.0, and it is the one condition of the summit the work does not meet. Migrant Mother builds its archetype inside one frame and holds the axis at 8.7; Sander builds his across six hundred, and the building is in the order, not in the faces.
The scheme is also what makes the work necessary. Almost any single portrait could be taken away: remove the Pastry Cook and the tradesmen still stand. Remove the last people and the cycle loses its fall; remove the farmers and it loses its ground; remove the city and nothing is left for the rest to answer. The groups are compelled, the number of pictures in each only permitted, and The Inevitable stands at 7.6, a tenth above the Necessity Cap. Walker Evans’s American Photographs, a book its maker fixed in 1938 and standing at 8.6, holds The Inevitable at 8.3 and The Living Form at 8.8; Sander never fixed his whole, and both axes are charged for it.
Movement IV
The pastry cook stands round in white before the dark of his kitchen, facing the camera. Everything in the picture is evidence: the setting of the figure in the frame, at a length that lets the clothes, the hands and the stance carry as much as the face; daylight that models the figure fully and throws no theatrical shadow; sharpness from edge to edge, so that a cuff and a crease count; a long exposure that asks the sitter to hold still and gives the picture its composed gravity; a print in a full tonal range. The Young Farmers, three figures caught turning without a blur, show the same command. The Made stands at 8.6, held there by range: many pictures in the body are sound professional portraits.
The method is the form, and the form is the knowledge. The same frontal address, the same light, the same distance and the same plain sharpness, held across every sitter, mean that the difference between two portraits is a difference of life and not of style; the order of the portfolios turns comparison into an argument about the social whole. Photography’s claim to have been there gives the faces their evidence, where a painted typology would be an opinion. The Living Form stands at 8.5, below the figures it might have had, because the arrangement of the whole is the maker’s plan realised by others after his death.
One law governs the body. A farm couple in the Westerwald in the 1910s and a political prisoner in the 1930s, a painter of the avant garde and an inmate of an asylum, are each set facing the camera in their own role, in plain light, at the same distance, unflattered and unmocked. The law holds across class, decade, regime, sanity and death, and The Inner Law stands at 8.8. Its strain is in the categories: a portrait could sit in two groups, and the late folders of the persecuted break the original cycle, as history broke it.
Movement V
The method was taken from the type photograph, the anthropological and police record that treated sitters as specimens, and from the physiognomy that ran from Lavater onward; Sander himself had practised pictorialism, and the trade he knew was the retouched studio portrait before a painted backdrop. He turned the frontal, serial method on a whole modern nation, every class, by consent and without retouching, so that the archive became a portrait of a society rather than a catalogue of the other. The stake was forty years of a trade spent on a project with no patron and no market. The book of 1929 was suppressed under the National Socialist government, whose ideal of the German face its faces did not fit, and The Swerve stands at 8.6.
Benjamin, in 1931, read the book as an atlas for training the eye on faces at a time when that would become necessary. Walker Evans reviewed it and took its sober frontality into American Photographs. Diane Arbus studied Sander and turned his frontal address on her own city; her Identical Twins stands at 8.0. The typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher descend from it, and through them the Düsseldorf school and the portraits of Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth; Richard Avedon, Rineke Dijkstra and Judith Joy Ross stand in its line. Pressure on Tradition stands at 8.9, held below 9 because much of the reach came only after the war. Robert Frank’s The Americans, a later survey of a nation, stands at 8.7.
What survives is less than was made. The project was never finished, its one published form was suppressed, and a large share of the negatives is reported lost; the posthumous edition carries the whole, and the losses fall on its fullness rather than its principal images. The Imperishable stands at 8.8. The body holds labour, the family, the state, class, the city and the country, art, the sacred thinly, sickness and death, and a history that entered uninvited, in one method under one scheme; The Encompassed stands at 8.5, above Las Meninas, which holds its orders in one room at 8.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The Epochal Gate is not, at The Archetypal Deep, and the aggregate is below the summit in any case. It stands at 8.4, in Tier IV.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, run on a body of some six hundred portraits, finds almost every single picture removable. Take away the Pastry Cook and the tradesmen still stand; take away one farm family and the farm families remain. A typology is additive by nature: the plan could have taken another portfolio, and the maker’s own practice shows its edges moving for forty years. What resists subtraction is the scheme. Remove the last people and the cycle from the soil to the city loses its fall; remove the farmers and it loses its ground; remove the city and nothing is left for the rest to answer. The groups are compelled by the argument, the number of pictures in each only permitted by it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
What is brought into the open can be stated, and it holds. A society carries its order on its bodies: estate, trade, class and history are legible in a stance, a pair of hands, a collar, a coat worn on the way to a dance. The face of a person in a given place and decade is at once an individual and a social fact, and the camera can read both without caricature. The Young Farmers in town suits, the Bricklayer bearing his hod like a column, the radio secretary with her cigarette and cropped hair each disclose the strain between a person and the role the age assigns. Held below the top because the type sometimes stands in for the person, and the disclosure needs the scheme seen whole.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The manner is sober and level by intent: the sitter faces the lens, the light is plain daylight, nothing is heightened. Elevation is therefore rare and of one kind, a grave, cold dignity met in particular images. The Young Farmers, turning on a country road with the field behind them, hold a gathered stillness that has lasted a century; the Bricklayer has the monumentality of a figure of labour from an old frieze; the Blind Children, the persecuted and a dead man among the last people reach a quiet dread. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency: across hundreds of pictures most are portraits of decent competence, whose height is interest rather than transport, and the method itself restrains height.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Here the work builds more than it evokes. The scheme is itself a myth of society: it begins with the farmer, man of the soil, rises through trade, the family, the estates and the arts to the city, and ends with the last people, the old, the sick and the dead. That is a cycle of the social world as a life, from rooted origin to dissolution, and it bears the arrangement. Within it the types are archetypal figures, the mother, the craftsman, the beggar, the artist, while each picture remains a nameable person on a given day. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myth is a scheme more than a lived pattern: single images seldom carry the archetype from within, and the cycle is legible only in the order of the portfolios.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance: the studio portrait of the late nineteenth century, retouched and posed before painted backdrops; pictorialism, which Sander himself practised; physiognomy from Lavater onward; and the anthropological and police type photograph, which treated sitters as specimens. The departure is to take the type photograph’s frontal, uniform, serial method and turn it on a whole modern nation, every class, by consent and in the sitter’s own role, without retouching or backdrop, so that the archive becomes a portrait of a society rather than a catalogue of the other. The stake was real: a commercial photographer spent forty years on a project with no patron and no market, and the regime of 1933 suppressed the book. New Objectivity painting and the documentary impulse of the decade were common ground.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely. As single portraits these are fine pictures; as a typology they know something no single portrait can: that persons in a society can be compared, and that the comparison is the disclosure. Every element of the form serves this: the same frontal address, the same daylight, the same distance, the same plain sharpness, so that difference between sitters is difference of life and not of style; and the order of the portfolios, which turns comparison into an argument about the social whole. Photography’s claim to have been there gives the faces their evidence; a painted typology would be an opinion. Held below the higher figures because the maker never fixed the final form, and only Antlitz der Zeit stands as his completed one.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise, and the evidence is nearly a century of return. Döblin introduced the book of 1929. Walter Benjamin, in his Little History of Photography (1931), read it as an atlas for training the eye on faces, at a time when that reading would become necessary. Walker Evans wrote on it in 1931; John Berger’s essay The Suit and the Photograph reads class from the Young Farmers and the village band; Susan Sontag questioned its pseudo-scientific neutrality. The questions keep yielding: whether type or person is the subject, whether typology is complicit with the racial science of its years or its rebuke, what the sitters chose and what the camera imposed, what the late pictures of the persecuted do to the scheme. The body, seldom seen whole, yields more on each reading of its order.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European documentary and portrait photography of the 1920s and after. Intrinsic force: the founding statement of the typological portrait, the photographic survey of a whole society as one work, and with Atget and Evans the ground of documentary as an art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Walker Evans reviewed Antlitz der Zeit and took its sober frontality into American Photographs; Diane Arbus studied Sander and turned his frontal address on her own city; the industrial typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher are acknowledged descendants, and through them the Düsseldorf school and the frontal portraits of Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth; Richard Avedon’s In the American West; Rineke Dijkstra and Judith Joy Ross. Held below 9 because much of the reach was delayed until after the war.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about a century. Form: the scheme survives in Sander’s hand, and its best known images survive in negatives and vintage prints; but the work was never completed, its one published form was suppressed by the state, and a large share of the negatives is reported lost. What now stands is a posthumous edition of about six hundred images built from his plan, and the losses fall on the body’s fullness rather than on its principal images. Presence: continuous since the 1950s in museums, books and teaching, interrupted in the 1930s and 1940s. Fabric: glass negatives and silver prints, stable where kept. The charge for loss and for an unfinished, reconstructed whole takes the figure below the usual step for its age; the presence of its central images holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged as command of large-format portrait photography and of the series. The making is exact and load-bearing: the sitter placed in the frame, often at full length, so that clothes, hands and stance carry as much as the face; daylight handled so that the modelling is full and no shadow falls theatrical; sharpness from edge to edge, so that a cuff and a crease are evidence; long exposures that require the sitter’s stillness and give the pictures their deliberate gravity; the gelatin silver print in a full tonal range. The Pastry Cook, round in white before the dark of his kitchen, and the Young Farmers, three figures caught turning without a blur, show command at the highest level. What holds the axis is range: the method is held constant by design, and many pictures are sound professional portraits.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a farm couple in the Westerwald in the 1910s and a political prisoner or a man in the uniform of the regime in the 1930s; or the painter of the avant garde and the inmate of an asylum. They obey one law: the sitter faces the camera in his or her own role, in plain light, at the same distance, sharp, unflattered and unmocked. The law holds across class, decade, regime, sanity and death, and the range it governs is the widest a portrait photograph can cover, a whole society over forty years. Narrowness is not coherence, and this is not narrow. Held below the top because the categories sometimes strain against the pictures, and the late folders of the persecuted break the original cycle, as history broke it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held are many, and held in one structure rather than listed. Labour, in the farmers, smiths, cooks, bricklayers and factory hands. The family, in couples, mothers and children, generations posed together. The state and its orders, in officials, soldiers, students in their corps colours and later the uniformed men of the regime. Class, as the governing principle. The city and the country, as the two poles. Art and thought, in painters, writers, composers and architects. The sacred, more thinly, in priests and nuns. Sickness, madness, age and death, in the last people. History, which entered the work uninvited as the Weimar order gave way to persecution and war. One method under one scheme integrates them. Held below the top because the inner life is reached only through the surface of a face.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, then The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.8, then The Unconcealment, The Swerve, The Bottomless Well and The Made at 8.6. The founding statement of the typological portrait, with a reach running through Evans, Arbus, the Bechers and the Düsseldorf school; one law of frontal regard held across class, decade, regime, sanity and death; a society shown carrying its order on its bodies; the type photograph’s method turned from the specimen to a whole nation; and a body that has yielded for nearly a century.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.5: a sober, level manner by intent, rising to a grave dignity in particular images, with most of the body giving interest rather than transport. Next above it, The Inevitable at 7.6, a scheme compelled but its pictures interchangeable within their places, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, a cycle of the social world built in the order of the portfolios rather than carried from within the single images.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet at one condition: The Unconcealment at 8.6, The Swerve at 8.6, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 falls five tenths short, the cycle from the soil to the last people being built in the scheme of the portfolios rather than carried from within the single images. The Universal Minimum is met at its edge, the lowest axis it governs being The Sublime at 7.5 against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 101.0, an average of 8.42 that displays 8.4, short of the 9.0 the summit requires; the aggregate holds the work in Tier IV, and the Epochal Gate would withhold the summit besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the photographs and of the project’s history, not from prints in hand: the scheme, Antlitz der Zeit and some few dozen of the best known images held well, the full body of about six hundred images thinly. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the Twentieth Century) by August Sander, the portrait project as one body: the portraits Sander made and assigned to it under his own scheme of seven groups, given on this page in outline and in English. Antlitz der Zeit (1929), sixty portraits with an introduction by Alfred Döblin, the only form of the project fixed and published in the 1920s, is weighed most, with the images the body most depends on. The posthumous edition of about six hundred images built from his plan stands as the form in which the whole is now seen, and its losses and its reconstruction are weighed on The Living Form and The Imperishable. Sander’s landscapes and views of Cologne and his commercial studio work are context, and are not scored. The titles of single portraits are the descriptive English titles they commonly carry; none is an inscription. No words of Sander’s, Döblin’s or Benjamin’s are quoted; Benjamin’s reading of the book is given in paraphrase. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the German names of the seven groups, the number of portfolios in Sander’s plan and of pictures in each, the publisher of Antlitz der Zeit, the fate of its printing plates and remaining stock and the year of it, the publisher, editors, year and exact count of the posthumous edition, the size and material of the negatives, the date of Sander’s turn from pigment processes to gelatin silver, the dates of Erich Sander’s imprisonment and the circumstances of his death, and the date, place and extent of the loss of the negatives and the move of a selection out of Cologne.