August Sander - Dean Gallery - 12th Feb to 10th July 2011

There's a MUST SEE exhibition at the Dean Gallery at the moment! An exhibition of August Sander’s extraordinary photographic thesis of 1930s German society in all its forms.

The exhibition comprises a series of portrait photographs. They are straight-forward and direct images, usually posed, occasionally awkwardly. What first struck me was the scale of Sander’s undertaking. Travelling the length and breadth of the country, he sought to capture every German ‘type’ that he encountered; from the high class, via the blue and white collar workers, the farmers, the artists, the military, to those outwith the class system: the waifs, vagrants and fringe figures of the time. The show itself is an extensive representation of this body of work.  

Sander’s work strikes me as a predecessor of street photography. The ‘warts and all’ aspect of Sander’s work and his ability to capture and suggest character is reminiscent of photographers like Diane Arbus, whose iconic images of the ‘freaks’ and down and outs of 70s New York occupied the same wall space in the Dean Gallery just a few months ago.

On the most immediate level, the exhibition demonstrates how the passage of time has rendered Sander’s work of stand-alone interest as a fascinating and valuable historical record of a nation teetering on the brink of a World War. However, wandering around the gallery and becoming more deeply immersed in 1930s Germany, you gradually come to suspect the cleverness of these deceptively simple, seemingly impartial images. Sander in fact seems to be making very quiet and subtle suggestions to his viewers.  

As with the portrait tradition in painting, the resulting product is often a combination of what the sitter wishes to convey about themselves, what they can’t avoid revealing about themselves, what we the viewer choose to project onto them and, most significantly here, what the artist chooses to present. Amusingly and peculiarly, Sander’s sitters begin to merge visibly with their professions: a portly hulk of a man is revealed to be a butcher; physically exuding wealth and power, an impeccably dressed businessman fixes the camera with a steely stare and a group of bohemians somewhat self-consciously attempt to appear simultaneously louche and intellectual. There are physical and character types you recognise from today, and types that strangely seem somehow to have been specific to that age, and to have since died out.

Sander’s approach is immensely clever – he let’s the images speak for themselves; his political leanings hinted at in the most subtle of ways by the mere fact he juxtaposes Nazi officers and vagrants, fat-cat business men and ragged labourers. The apparent impartiality of Sander’s photographic project, the lack of overt criticism of the Nazi regime one way or the other, was both a product of the brewing political situation and an interpretation in photographic form of the New Objectivity art movement of the 1920s and 30s.

Modern Art was soon to be labelled ‘degenerate’ by Hitler’s government and banned altogether, essentially because art represents a freedom of expression: intolerable in a fascist regime. To utter one’s opinion if it in any way deviated from the party line was not a good idea. Sander’s photography neatly - and arguably, somewhat cynically - manages to sidestep this problem.

His approach also embodies the collective cynicism with which German artists approached their work after World War 1 – the idealism of Expressionism having been blown to bits in the trenches. Now artists and writers sought to create objective depictions of the immediate, as opposed to subjective expressions of the imagination, suggestive of hope for the future or glorification of the past. However, by presenting the façade alone - as Sander does in these images – the New Objectivity paradoxically could not help but reveal its desire for a reality alternative to the un-gilded version it presented.