August Sander was one of the greatest and most influential photographers of the 20th century.  He is internationally renowned for his monumental and ambitious project of creating a typological “total picture” of German society, now known as People of the 20th Century.  As early as 1911 Sander conceived of his intention to make what he described as “a physiognomic portrait of an age,” but the National Socialists intervened in 1936 to thwart his progress by destroying the printing plates and all remaining copies of his first book, Antlitz der Zeit [Face of Our Time] (1929).  Sander continued work on his project until his death in 1964.  The intended publication, People of the 20th Century, was finally realized by the August Sander Archive, Cologne, in 2002 and is comprised of 619 portraits in seven volumes.

Early in his career as a portrait photographer, Sander rejected his painterly gum-bichromate prints in favor of the clarity and honesty of the unretouched gelatin-silver print.  His guiding credo, to “look, observe and think,” led him “to see things as they are and not as they should or might be.” His direct approach to sitters resulted in unsentimental portraits, a radical approach at a time when pictorialism was still a popular aesthetic.

August Sander’s enormous impact on contemporary photography cannot be overstated.  It can be seen in the work of the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth, and in the photographs of Judith Joy Ross and Rineke Dijkstra, all of whom, among countless other photographers, cite Sander’s influence on the direction of their work.  Sander’s detailed concept of presenting what the art historian John von Hartz describes as “a social structure of his time in the form of portraits” continues to inspire photographers who also seek to achieve an incisive picture of the age and times in which we live.