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Sunday, July 18, 2004

ARTS

The Washington Post

PHOTOS COPYRIGHT DIE PHOTOGRAPHISCHE SAMMLUNG/SK STIFTUNG KULTUR-AUGUST SANDER ARCHIV, COLOGNE; ARS, NEW YORK

Early archetypes of a straight-ahead style that caught on later: Dadaist artist Raoul Hausmann, in dancers garb, in a 1929 photo. The subject of the 1928 Pastrycook posed for Sander 14 years earlier for Widower, far right.

Photos of a High, or at Least Curious, Order

SANDER, From N1
were shot in the 1930s, but they look almost nothing like other artistic photos of that era. Sander doesnt try to turn them into fancy modern compositions, with the off-kilter points of view, lively thrusts and dynamic balancing of forms of Bauhaus picture-taking. Instead, he sticks to an impressive foursquareness in his views. The subject that matters to him is stuck in the middle of the frame, with incidental detail left to fend for itself across the rest of the picture. Without further ado, a photograph of a flowering plant from the Brassicaceae family simply offers up its subject for our viewing, caught surrounded by the mess of its native habitat. The image suggests that the lovely blooming plant can speak for itself, without any need for artistic gilding of the lily. A wonderfully gnarled beech tree similarly takes up the middle of an image, with Sander shot this profile of painter Otto Dix in half its spreading branches out of focus and 1924. lopped off by the pictures edge. Its more the German people what his famous suclike a childs honest snapshot of a beloved cessors Bernd and Hilla Becher did in their grandparent than a fancy artists renderphotographic catalogues of water towers ing. and steel mills. A photo of two marsh plants shows them But for every eloquent picture that standing side by side in front of a screen of seems to speak of a sitters self and role in other plants. They read as entries in a piclife, there are others in Sanders project torial inventory, rather than as subjects in a that are almost entirely mute, sometimes fancy botanical portrait session. This kind almost impressively dull. In a picture of of picture breaks all the classic rules for eletwo Gypsy women, the faces are so blurred gant compositioneven as recently as 20 that theres not much chance of reading years ago, I had photography instructors anything out of them. Many of the men in who taught that this kind of symmetry Sanders Businessman portfolio are more makes a picture fall apart along its cenor less interchangeable; its a safe bet that tral axis. But that fault becomes a virtue in Sander pulled them from the files of his a picture that aims to tell the truth without commercial practice, where they would embellishment. have been commissioned for generic corpoThe nature of all photography is docurate use. (Before the Nazis went after him mentary. . . . In documentary photography, as a suspiciously liberal-minded character, it is less important to observe aesthetic Sander had run a successful mainstream rules in form and composition, but instead studio.) to focus on the meaning of the image, said A good few of the pictures of farmers Sander, around the time that he was taking and tradesmen barely give a clue to their his landscape photographs. sitters occupations: They show people in But I think its a mistake to take him at their buttoned-up Sunday best. These bahis word. If giving information about the nal portraits also must have been culled subject really mattered most, the pseudofrom Sanders commercial work, paid for scientific purity of Bauhaus modernism by sitters keen on concealing roots and ocmight have done a better job. Its harder to cupation, even personality, behind fine get those marsh plants amid the chaos of cloth. unvarnished truth than it would have been in a more calculated composition. I dont think Sanders goal is actually documentary. He is an artist, after all, not a scientist; he thought of himself as one, moved among the self-declared progressive artists of Cologne and was touted by museum heads. What hes after in his photographs is an artistic act that captures the look and feel and attitude of accidental, unartistic observation. Theyre an early archetype of a disingenuous, styleless style that caught on later. It took until the 1960s, with the work of Lee Friedlander and eventually of photographers like Washingtons own John Gossage, for photography to grab onto the feeling of appealingly flat-footed haphazardness that you see already in Sander. Friedlanders messy, straight-ahead pictures of desert cactuses, set in the middle of the frame or caught in a larger tangle of shadows and distracting lines, are close analogues to the plant pictures that Sander had taken decades before. At his most aggressively antiaesthetic, Sander created pictures that would not be paralleled until the 1990s, when an ascetic, documentary approach to taking photographsthink of Nan Goldin became the norm on arts cutting edges. The tension between information and style that the nature photos hint at becomes a full-blown A sense of flat-footed haphazardness: Foursquare photographs that suggest the plants can speak for themselves, without any artistic gilding of the lily. conflict in Sanders famous portrait project. Many Washingtonians may already know some of the most striking of these pictures. Gerd Sander, the artists grandson, showed them in the photography gallery he opened in Washington in the 1970s. (Local photo dealer Kathleen Ewing still stocks portraits printed by Gerd from Sanders negatives.) The problem is that the sensitive Sander portraits most people knowthe ones sold in galleries and anthologized in photo surveysdont really do any kind of justice to how anti-aesthetic the project as a whole can be. The full spread of vintage prints in the Met exhibition should wake viewers up to the real complexities of Sanders artmaking. Theres also a new seven-volume, 619image book$100 through the Metthat takes a stab at reconstructing what a complete People of the 20th Century might have looked like, using new prints for images that survive only as negatives. Those volumes make Sander out to be even more interesting than his biggest fans could have imagined. The books dust jacket gives the standard take on Sander: His intention was for numerous individual portraits, arranged in groups according to occupational, social or family criteria, to reflect the various classes and elements of society, and thus together create a picture of the age. But if that was truly Sanders stated intention, he joins a long roster of artists who havent had a clue of what their work is really all about. The exquisite Sander portraits that get reprinted again and again do point to your standard catalogue of human types. The chubby pastry cook, proudly stirring some batter, demonstrates the kind of aristocratic poise that can come with an honestly practiced craft. The smiling pair of boxers look predictably, happily addled. The upper-class, overdressed frat boy shows off a faceful of dueling scars, but theres doubt in his eyes. Seeing these images, its not hard to imagine Sanders work as a kind of heartfelt inventory of humanity, organized along its natural fracture lines: The Young Farmer, The Master Craftsman, The Elegant Woman are the titles of some of the 50 or so portfolios that Sander arranged his project into. Sander is often billed as doing for As for the categories Sander uses to divvy up the world, not all of them group things as crisply as you might imagine. The Street and Street Life, or portfolios such as The Radio and Traffic whose original contents have been lost over the years, dont stand out as part of an obvious classifying scheme, the way a grouping like The Soldier might. And the category People Who Came to My Door sounds like the almost arbitrary sorting tool you get in conceptual art in the 1960s, when artists were looking to cede control of their decision-making. It recalls projects like Ed Ruschas Every Building on the Sunset Strip, a hugely influential book of photographs from 1966. In Europe, there had been a long tradition of images meant to capture the most characteristic face that different kinds of people present to the worldDiderots Encyclopedie was full of pictures of the craftsman with his trademark tools. In the 19th century, anthropologists and racists even distilled this into the idea of the type photograph, a mug shot that would capture crucial, unchanging features of the globes ethnic and social groups. Sander is often billed as a late, great contributor to this tradition, but with a particularly humane take on it. Hes seen as bearing thorough, feeling witness to the full Family of Man. I think that gets The People of the 20th Century almost completely wrong. Whats striking about the project isnt how well it sorts the world into compelling categories. Its how splendidly it fails in the attempt. The natural haphazardness captured in each of the Phillips Collection landscapes is the governing principle behind Sanders entire portrait project. Sander sets up a strange, often incoherent sorting system for the world, and then sets out to fill the niches hes created. He trawls through the vast compendium of images he has at his professional disposal, taken between 1892 and 1954, and pulls out any picture that will fit one of his pigeonholeswhether it illustrates the subject at hand or not. The pictures range from Sanders first amateurish shots to sensitive examples of the portraitists art to forgettable hackwork: They are readymades, really, chosen for what they are and what Sander can do with them, rather than for how they look. Only Sander could know that the unremarkable picture of a suited man he titles Pharmacist depicts the professional he says it does, rather than the equally nondescript Dentist who joins him in Sanders Doctor portfolio. We have to take Sanders word for it that his young farmers really work the land; most of his pictures show them dressed in their townwear. Its as though Sanders project sets out to test the ancient notion that his sitters looks ought to reflect the people that they are in life. He picks out categories, finds images he knows are supposed to fill themand then leaves us to discover that theres hardly a close match between the two. Which is much more important than convincing us that pastry cooks sometimes look as we imagine pastry cooks should look. Some of Sanders odder categories seem devised to make this point almost explicitly. Germanys Jews arent given their own ethnic portfolioquite. Theyre included within a larger grouping called The City, in their own separate portfolio thats titled The Persecuted. Their essential it-ness as a group doesnt depend on a shared religion, Biblical roots or unalterably hooked noses. They only become a crucial social category because of how theyre treated by the people all around themchange the treatment and the category simply disappears. The project implies a full repudiation of the kind of social sorting that led to the Nazis. It doesnt merely humanize that sorting, as the standard Sander cliche proclaims. Then there are the people who manage to illustrate the purported essence of more than one social category. One bowtied man is presented as the archetype of The Arbitrator, in a portfolio labeled The Judge and the Attorney. But a little digging shows hes already turned up once before, in precisely the same clothes, as the paterfamilias in a group shot titled Farming Family. If the same image can illustrate two different ideas, how tight a fit can there really be between each pigeon and its unique pigeonhole? And, on at least one occasion, a sitter turns out to be such a chameleon that he changes his look and the social category he belongs to, at will. Raoul Hausmann, a player on the radical Berlin art scene, doesnt appear in any of the portfolios that Sander groups together as The Artists. Instead, he first gets dressed up in a natty suit and monocle to play the Inventor and Dadaist, pretty much indistinguishable from all the tidy technocrats who appear alongside him in one portfolio. And then we see him again in a grabbag portfolio called Types and Figures of the City, now shirtless and barefoot in a bohemians drawstring pants, in an image titled Raoul Hausmann as Dancer. Its that word asthe only as in the whole projectthat gives the game away. Hausmanns absurdist, Dada principles allow him to present himself to and in the world both as a dancer and a Dadaist inventor (whatever that could be). He can bend reality and social categories to suit his whim. Sanders project does the same. It pretends to be a rigorous, technocratic study of the human race. But it really turns out to be a wild dance through the unfiltered mess that is reality. People of the 20th Century revels in the systems and categories we all use to describe the world: Some of its lovely portraits set them up as though theres something there, while its coarser pictures joyfully knock them down.