Volume 51, Number 14 · September 23, 2004
Sander's Human Comedy
By Luc Sante
August Sander: People of the Twentieth Century A Photographic Portrait of Germany
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 25–September 19, 2004
People of the Twentieth Century
by August Sander, edited by Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, revised and newly compiled by Susanne Lange, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, and Gerd Sander
Abrams, seven volumes, $195.00
The Germans came surprisingly late to photography. Possibly because of the dominance of the field by the French and the British—not to mention the Americans—Germany did not produce a single especially memorable photographic artist or image until near the end of the nineteenth century, when Wilhelm Plüschow and Wilhelm von Gloeden separately ventured to the Mediterranean to pose naked young men, sometimes with Pan horns, in light-classical motifs. Around that same time, two large projects, har-bingers of the next century, were quietly beginning to germinate entirely outside the realm of art photography as it was then understood. One of these could hardly have been farther from the public eye: Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932), an apprentice drawing teacher from the Hartz Mountains, began in the 1890s to systematically photograph plant forms—buds, blossoms, stalks, leaves—against plain backgrounds as a reference for artists and craftsmen working under the sway of the fashion for vegetal designs that was about to culminate in Art Nouveau. The pictures stressed the graphic and sculptural qualities of the plants, defamiliarizing them nearly to the point of making them appear artificial, and were startlingly lucid and terse in their rigor.
Review, 4198 words
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