![]() ![]() In his seminal essay “Little History of Photography,” published two years later, Benjamin praised Sander’s photography as providing nothing less than a quasi-physiognomic “training manual” for the age-an era, the critic famously wrote, in which individuals “will have to get used to being seen according to where one comes from.” 2 Sander’s photographs of bakers and accountants and washerwomen, in other words, pictured for Benjamin less isolated subjects than a distinctly modern logic of subjectivity itself-in which what we are and how we come to be seen is indivisible from the cultural environments, markers, and relations that form and connect us. It was just this aspect-his portraits as the index of a specific culture in the throes of a particular historical process-that Sander chose to highlight in titling his preliminary 1929 sampling of his portraits with the expression Antlitz der Zeit: roughly translated, “the face of our time.” This dimension of the work was at the root of critic Walter Benjamin’s interest in Sander’s project as well. Or, more precisely, of the German people (who had lost their kaiser only with the war’s end in 1918) on the path to democracy, advanced industrial modernity, and, ultimately, authoritarian terror. Young Farmers, most readers will know, is among the hundreds of photographs, made across decades, that Sander came to conceptualize as part of his monumental (and never realized) portrait project “People of the Twentieth Century.” Conceived around 1922 as a set of forty-five portfolios of twelve photographs each-to be arranged in a carefully assembled sequence moving from farmers to craftspeople and the educated middle class to, finally, a diverse array of social outcasts labeled simply “the last people”-Sander’s vast survey was to present a systematic, if not quite comprehensive, sociological atlas of the German people. Our Instagram feeds and work-profile pages, in short-where each newly uploaded photograph marks a potential addition to expanding training data sets-are the Texas oil wells of the Clearview AI age. As Powers’s title suggests, Sander’s image functions as both the spark for and the through line of his novel, which begins with a viewing of the photograph decades later at the Detroit Institute of Arts and subsequently traces interwoven narratives that follow Sander’s farmers across time and space: to the country dance they were headed for on that 1914 spring day, to the cataclysmic war that began only months later, and finally-through both their lived actions and their photographic representation-to the experiences of later generations on both sides of the Atlantic. Such is the encounter of German photographer August Sander and the three young men pictured in one of his best-known images- Jungbauern (Young Farmers), 1914-as imagined in the opening pages of Richard Powers’s 1985 debut novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. ![]() No worries, the photographer countered he was there, in fact, to propose a group photo-a slice-of-life shot that, he insisted, would be “for science’s sake only, and for the archives: a personal record of the conversation we shared today.” 1 Adolphe, at the head of the cluster, offered apologies for his companions’ brusqueness. Peter suspected a questionable sales pitch. Hubert, the first of the three to speak, took the man for a fellow enthusiast of far-left politics. THE PHOTOGRAPHER approached the trio on his bike, a bundle of gear balanced on his front fender and a wide-brimmed hat covering his head. © Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur–August Sander Archiv, Cologne/ARS, NY. August Sander, Jungbauern (Young Farmers), 1914, gelatin silver print, 9 1⁄4 × 6 3⁄4". ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |