August Sander

Sander's work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series People of the 20th Century. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic.

• Name — August Sander • Born — 17 November 1876 • Birthplace — Herdorf, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire • Died — 20 April 1964 • Place of death — Cologne, West Germany • Occupation — Photographer • Spouse — Anna Seitenmacher (m. 1902)

Sander was born on 17 November 1876, in Herdorf, the son of a carpenter working in the mining industry. He had six siblings.

While working at the local Herdorf iron-ore mine, Sander first learned about photography by assisting a photographer from Siegen who was also working for the mining company. With financial support from his uncle, he bought photographic equipment and set up his own darkroom. Sander spent his military service (1897–1899) as an assistant to Georg Jung of Trier; they worked throughout Germany including in Berlin, Magdeburg, Halle, Leipzig and Dresden. In 1901, he started working for Photographische Kunstanstalt Greif photo studio in Linz, Austria-Hungary, becoming a partner in 1902, and then sole-owner. In the late 1940s he joined the Upper Austrian Art Society. Sander left Linz at the end of 1909 or 1910 and set up a new studio at Dürener Strasse 201 in the Lindenthal district of Cologne. People of the 20th CenturyIn 1911, Sander began with the first series of portraits for his work People of the 20th Century. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic. The series is divided into seven sections: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People (homeless persons, veterans, etc.). • Illustration — German Deciduous Forest, Krefeld (1939), The Phillips Collection In the early 1920s, he came in contact with the Cologne Progressives, a radical group of artists linked to the workers' movement, which, as Wieland Schmied put it, "sought to combine constructivism and objectivity, geometry and object, the general and the particular, avant-garde conviction and political engagement, and which perhaps approximated most to the forward looking of New Objectivity [...] ". In 1927, Sander and writer Ludwig Mathar travelled through Sardinia for three months, where he took around 500 photographs. However, a planned book detailing his travels was not completed. Sander's Face of our Time was published in 1929. It contains a selection of 60 portraits from his series People of the 20th Century, and is introduced by an essay by Alfred Döblin titled "On Faces, Pictures, and their Truth". Under the Nazi regime, his work and personal life were greatly constrained. Sander's 1929 book Face of our Time was seized in 1936 and the photographic plates destroyed. Around 1942, during World War II, he left Cologne and moved to the small village of Kuchhausen, in the Westerwald region; this allowed him to save the most important part of his body of work. His Cologne studio was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid, but tens of thousands of negatives, which he had left behind in a basement near his former apartment in the city, survived the war. to negatives in this basement were then destroyed in a 1946 fire. That same year, Sander began his postwar photographic documentation of the city. He also tried to record the mass rape of German women by Red Army soldiers in the Soviet occupation zone. In 1953, Sander sold a portfolio of 408 photographs of Cologne, taken between 1920 and 1939, to the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum. These would be posthumously published in book format in 1988, under the title Köln wie es war (Cologne as it was). In 1962, 80 photographs from the People of the 20th Century project were published in book format, under the name Deutschenspiegel. Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (German Mirror. People of the 20th Century).

Sander married Anna Seitenmacher in 1902. She gave birth to Erich (son, born in 1903) and Gunther (son, born in 1907), and twins in 1911, Sigrid and Helmut; only Sigrid survived. Anna died on 27 May 1957, in Kuchhausen, Germany. Erich, who was a member of the left wing Socialist Workers' Party (SAP), was arrested by Nazis in 1934 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he died of an untreated ruptured appendix in 1944, shortly before the end of his sentence. • Illustration — Memorial plaque at his residence in Cologne • Illustration — Sander's grave, Melaten Cemetery, Cologne Sander died in Cologne of a stroke on 20 April 1964. He was buried next to his son Erich in Cologne's Melaten Cemetery.

In 1992, Gerd Sander, August's grandson, sold the archive to German nonprofit art foundation SK Stiftung Kultur. It is on display at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur. In 2017, Julian Sander, Gerd's son, claimed to represent August's estate, and issued a press release stating that the archive would now be housed by Hauser & Wirth. The claim has been disputed by SK Stiftung Kultur, and the ownership dispute is still ongoing. In 2022, Julian Sander made available non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of the entire archive of Sander negatives on NFT platform OpenSea. Buying a Sander NFT was free apart from initial upload fees. However for all resale transactions thereon, via a smart contract Julian Sander would receive 7.5% of the resale cost and photographer Alejandro Cartagena's Fellowship Trust would receive 2.5%. All NFTs in the collection were claimed and, within a few weeks, over 400 ETH was traded in secondary sales on OpenSea. Soon and without warning, the archive was delisted from OpenSea because SK Stiftung Kultur claimed that as it owns the copyright to Sander's work until 2034, the NFT collection is thus in violation of copyright law. Julian Sander argues that the doctrine of fair use allows him to publish the images in such commercial settings.

• August Sander—Photographs of an Epoch, 1904–1959, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1980 and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1982, among others. • August Sander: People of the Twentieth Century—A Photographic Portrait of Germany, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2004 • August Sander, People of the 20th Century, São Paulo Art Biennial, Brazil, 2012 • Portrait.Landscape.Architecture, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, 2013 • Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919–1933, Tate Liverpool. Paired with work by Otto Dix.

August Sander is classed in the genre documentary photography. Recorded with the occupation visual artist. Recorded as a citizen of Germany.

Sander's work is held in the following permanent collection: • Museum of Modern Art, New York: 748 works (as of 31 December 2022) • Tate, UK: 5 prints (as of 31 December 2022) • Metropolitan Museum of Art: 119 prints • National Gallery of Art, Washington DC: 17 prints • J. Paul Getty Museum