FASCINATION/AUGUST SANDER

August Sander (1876-1964) was one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers. He spent his early career as a commercial portraitist in Linz, Austria, but began the huge group of photographs for which he is best remembered after 1904 or so, when his pictures underwent a change in style. Where he had once flattered the vanity of his subjects with beautifying effects, his new work was cool, remorselessly detailed, analytical and penetrating, a kind of counterpart, sharply Germanic in tone, to the expressive realism of the Frenchman Eugene Atget. In 1910 Sander moved to Cologne, mixing in the 1920s with the painters known as the Cologne Progressives. His output there epitomized one side of what, in the Weimar Period, would be called theNeue Sachlichkeit. This term has been used for a very wide range of German art and literature, from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain to the grotesqne caricatures of George Grosz and of Sander’s friend Otto Dix; it has of ten meant “reportorial,” indicating work visually cleaner and cooler than the high German Expressionism of the early 20th century, but it has also been used very differently, for visually extreme work that was thought “objective” in that it showed how rotten life had become. “Neue Sachlichkeit” is also applied to certain photographs of the 1920s, notably Albert Renger-Patszch‘s and Sander’s own, characterized by sharp focus, clear lighting, the absence of distortion and a seeming unemotionality. Nonetheless, traces of the angst that troubles most Neue Sachlichkeit painting can also be found in Sander’s portraits, which he made on large glass negatives and produced as gelatin silver prints.