WHO IS AUGUST SANDER?
August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer.
ABOUT AUGUST SANDER:
Sander’s photography career began when he was a teenager. Sander worked on his project through a period of tumultuous social and political change that spanned the Weimar Republic and the Nazi regime, and one of his early book projects, Face of Our Time. Sander’s work continues to be a source of inspiration for generations of photographers, including Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Rineke Dijkstra.
5 THINGS ABOUT AUGUST SANDER:
- August Sander didn’t come from an artistic background
- One of his projects lasted his whole career
- He captured a key moment in German History
- August Sander avoided new technology
- His influences cannot be overestimated
IMAGE ANALYSIS:
Visual –
In this image you can see a man standing against bricks. This is an example of an environmental portrait taking it perhaps at his place of work. His full body stance suggest power and strength, he is showing his whole body which suggests he is revealing himself and has nothing to hide. He is wearing a white jumpsuit, suggesting he is in work uniform, however you can see some dirt suggests he work hard labour. Furthermore due to the place this image is taken in suggests that he is a builder which shows he is hard working. The background is plain yet the positioning of the brick creates a frame around his body trapping him between the two towers, creating a slight frame in frame photograph. The tone of this image is muted and subtle, the black and white in this image does not creates a feeling of no emotion yet has a slight ominous undertone within it.
Technical –
Sander did not use the newly invented Leica camera. Instead he remained devoted to an old-fashioned large-format camera, glass negatives and long exposure times. This allowed him to capture minute details of individual faces.
Contextual –
“Man of the Twentieth Century” was Sander’s monumental, lifelong photographic project to document the people of his native Westerwald, near Cologne. Sander was trying to document people and how they evolve and what they do for work showing the difference throughout the years. This image was taken in around 1926.