Outside the box
There’s
a neat parallel between the National Gallery’s touring exhibition
Art of War: The Prints of Otto Dix and the Art Gallery
of NSW’s new exhibition, The photographs of August Sander.
Both showcase the work of German artists who turned a mirror on
their society during the heady days of the Weimar Republic, only
to be shunned and stifled during the Nazi regime. The key difference
is that while Dix used drawings and prints, Sander used photographs.
The photographs of August Sander includes
155 photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles,
which has the most substantial collection of Sander photographs
outside of Germany (approximately 1,200). This is the first time
any Sander exhibition has been seen in Australia. Mind you, if
you miss out, it could be a while before you see another. The
AGNSW is the only Australasian venue to show this exhibition.
Following its presentation in Sydney, it will return to L.A.,
where it will be showing from 6 May to 14 September 2008.
Sander once wrote, "Photography is a recreation
of nature, all visible forms appear in it exactly reproduced."
His belief in his own objectivity (as well as that of the camera)
appears never to have wavered during his lifetime (1876–1964).
His primary interest was to produce a definitive
"atlas" of the German people, exemplified by his ambitious
series, ‘People of the Twentieth Century’. The portfolios
he developed included farmers, skilled tradesmen, women, classes
and professions, artists and the city. He liked to photograph
ordinary people — his own family, rural people, children,
workers, artists, and the unemployed.
Although Sander never completed his project, he
left about 700 photographs. Given his humanist beliefs and the
diversity of the people he chose to photograph, it's doubtful
whether his life’s work could have ever been finished.
Photographs from the ‘People of the Twentieth
Century’ series formed the basis of his first book, Faces
of Our Time, published in 1929. With the rise of Nazism however,
Sander was marginalised. His son, Erich, was a member of a socialist
party, and was jailed for ten years in 1934. Sadly, Erich died
in 1944, shortly before his scheduled release.
The
Nazis seized the original plates for Faces of Our Time
in 1936, and they were destroyed. After that, Sander was forced
to work under greatly constrained conditions. He moved out of
Cologne and into the countryside. He continued to work, but largely
restricted himself to landscape photography.
The exhibition includes photographs of the landscape
surrounding Cologne from that era, photographs of the interior
of his home and studio in Cologne, a number of experiments with
photographs of facial features, examples of the postcards he produced
in his daily work as a commercial photographer and some of his
publications.
The range of the Getty Museum’s collection
enables a broad view of Sander’s work, given the inclusion
of iconic photographs such as 'Country Girls' (1925) (where the
twin-like nature of the two sisters is as riveting as Diane Arbus’
1960s photograph of twins) as well as small-scale, informal photographs
of children, multi-generational families and sporting groups.
His photographs of farming families from the Westerwald were intended
to show them as archetypes that would serve as a typology of human
character in general, while images such as ‘the people who
came to my door’ from the city portfolio speak of a sensitivity
that’s unusual in photography at that time.
Clearly Sander’s understanding of the nature
of the camera and of portraiture enabled him to develop a view
of the social whole and of its parts that remains unparalleled
to this day. For Sander, an understanding of the individual always
existed in relation to the group. The important and haunting detail
in these photographs arises from the minutiae of gesture: the
fold of the hands; the subtlety of the glance.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the J. Paul
Getty Museum’s 2000 In Focus book on August Sander
as well as texts produced in collaboration with Virginia Heckert,
associate curator at the Getty Museum, who is co-curator of the
exhibition.
David Edwards
