SANDER, AUGUST

born Nov. 17, 1876, Herdorf, near Cologne died April 20, 1964, Cologne German photographer who attempted to produce a comprehensive photographic document of the German people. The son of a mining carpenter, Sander apprenticed as a miner in 1889. Acquiring his first camera in 1892, he took up photography as an avocation and, after military service, took it up professionally. By 1904 he had his own studio in Linz, and, after his army service in World War I, he settled permanently in Cologne, where in the 1920s his circle of friends included photographers and painters dedicated to what was called the New Realism, or New Objectivity. At the Cologne Kunstverein exhibition in 1927, Sander showed 60 photographs of Man in the Twentieth Century, and two years later he published one volume of Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time), the first of what was projected to be a series offering a sociological pictorial survey of the class structure of Germanypeasants, workers, students, artists, politicians. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, however, he was subjected to official disapproval, and the plates for Antlitz der Zeit were seized and destroyed. (His son, a Socialist, was jailed and died in prison.) Sander turned to less controversial rural landscapes and nature subjects. Late in World War II he restarted his portrait survey, but most of the negatives were destroyed either in bombing raids or, later in 1946, by looters. Throughout the remainder of his life he nevertheless continued on a number of projects and books. The Federal Republic of Germany awarded him the Order of Merit in 1960.