Objective

Romantic

32. Self-portrait 1942

August
SanderObjective
Romantic
George Steeves, Curator

msvu Art Gallery, Halifax, Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing

in Publication
Steeves, George, writer of added text
August Sander: objective romantic/essay by
George Steeves.
Catalogue of an exhibition held at msvu
Art Gallery, September 7 October 20,
2013.Includes bibliographical references.
isbn 978-1-894518-69-7 (pbk.)
1. Sander, August--Exhibitions. i. Mount
Saint Vincent University.Art Gallery, host
institution. ii. Title.
tr647.s36135 2013 779.092 c2013-904664-x

6 Foreword

ingrid jenkner

7 Acknowledgements
ingrid jenkner

11 August Sander: Objective Romantic

george steeves

19 Plates
24 Middle-class Family, Cologne, 1923
george steeves

37 My Afternoon with August Sander

george steeves

43 Works in the Exhibition

47 Bibliography

Foreword

he German photographer August Sanders grand projectthe compilation of

more than six-hundred portraits into seven printed volumes, each dedicated to a
general type or categorywas never realized during his lifetime. His intention
was to create a sequenced mosaic of portraits, each of equal weight, that when
viewed together would leave an integrated impression of his time and place. The
details of Sanders portraits record the social stratifications of the erayet neither
his broadly inclusive categories nor the dignified treatment of his sitters respects the
prevailing distinctions between classes and races. Therein lies the paradox of the title:
Objective Romantic.
The modest selection of works documented in this book does not claim to
approximate the composite face the photographer had in mind. But it does
encourage readers to consider the portraits and landscapes as individually remarkable
images.
Sander worked on his national portrait from just before World War i, through
the Weimar period (19191933) and afterward under National Socialism. From the
outset, he worked in his mature style and with a sense of purpose that guided him
throughout his productive yearseven during the Third Reich, whose brutality he
discreetly and effectively resisted. The photographs documented here reflect the
chronological scope of his career, beginning with the portrait of a shepherd, The Man
of the Soil (1910), and ending with the Self-Portrait of 1942.
Fittingly for an artist who worked for the printed page, not the wall, a substantial
literature has accumulated around Sanders work. The contributors range from
Sanders direct descendants, through scholars and curators, to distinguished German
literary figures of his own time. Because of its author, George Steeves, this book adds
something new to an already impressive bibliography. Like Sander, Steeves is an
artist who practices black and white chemical photography, specializes in portrait
and landscape subjects, and responds to the romantic, expressive sensibilities that
characterized much European artmaking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. More than that, Steeves understands how the psychological transaction
between sitter and photographer affects the success of the portrait as a picture. His
careful research is enlivened by imaginative and surprisingly personal insights into
the methods of a man he never met, matched by original interpretations of his
photographs.
Ingrid Jenkner
Director
msvu Art Gallery

[6]

Acknowledgements

f the thirty-two photographs in this exhibition, thirty-one come from the

collection of the National Gallery of Canada. I am proud to acknowledge the
collaboration and generosity of the National Gallerys staff in the organization
of this exhibition. Principal among those who helped to process the loan are Ann
Thomas, Curator of Photography, and the staff of her department; Christine Sadler,
Exhibitions Management Chief and her team; the technical staff who prepared the
photographs for travel and exhibition; and the National Gallerys Director, Marc
Mayer.
Also to be thanked is Marilyn Lawson, who lent the iconic print Country Girls.
Graphic designer Robert Tombs endowed this book with elegance and clarity.
These qualities are also present in the text, thanks to the editorial skills of Megan
MacKay, a young poet employed at msvu Art Gallery as Acting Program Coordinator.
David Dahms, msvu Art Gallery Technician, installed the exhibition, and Traci
Steylen, Administrative Assistant, dealt ably with logistical matters.
Apart from the National Gallery Sander photographs, the essential component of
this project is its guest curator and writer, George Steeves. He selected the exhibition
and wrote the texts. His work of historical fiction, My Afternoon with August
Sander, represents a feat of creative scholarship seldom encountered in writing
about photographs, except in the books of the incomparable Eugenia Parry, who
wrote an autobiography of Lisette Model. Included in my expression of gratitude to
George Steeves are his two consultants: Dr. Astrid Brunner, who provided translations
of German reference texts while elucidating the cultural nuances, and Wolfgang
Jenkner, who fact-checked the military minutia and historical details on which the
verisimilitude of Steeves short story so heavily depends.
ij

[7]

[22]

Objective
Romantic

 31. Interior of Sanders House, Cologne 1938/printed later

August Sander
Objective Romantic

he Guns of August roared out the opening of wwi in the ebullient and doomed
summer of 1914. Within weeks the Kaisers army had neared the suburbs of Paris.
Nothing would ever be the same. August Sander was almost thirty-nine years
of age.
Sander and his wife Anna operated a commercial photographic portrait studio in
the Cologne suburb of Lindenthal. By this time Sander had long since given up his
first career as a painter and had dedicated himself to photography. He served his
apprenticeship and journeyman years in various German and Austrian photo studios
and printing workshops. He assiduously progressed through, and out of, the
conventions and foibles of turn-of-the-century painterly photography. Sander, like
Alfred Stieglitz in the usa and others, sensed the pressure of the turning tide of
history, and in response to this reacted by becoming a modernist. At the opening of
the Lindenthal studio in 1909 Sander issued an advertising brochure containing the
following manifesto:
I am not concerned with providing commonplace photographs like those made in the
finer large-scale studios of the city, but simple, natural portraits that show the subjects in
an environment corresponding to their own individuality, portraits that claim the right
to be evaluated as works of art and to be used as wall adornments.
In the decades to come, Sander used as tools his personality, instincts, and intellect to
achieve these objectives. Though the kernel of his artistic ambitions had its genesis in
the Belle poque, the forty years before The Great War, it would take wwi itself to
crack open the husk of that seed.
Born in 1876, just six years after the start of the Franco-Prussian War, in the
Siegerland region about 150 miles east of Cologne, Sander had a stern, frugal, though
supportive childhood. He grew up in a dynamic and optimistic period when Otto von
Bismarck was constructing the unified German nation-state. His compulsory active
military service ended in 1899, whereupon he was assigned to the reserves. When wwi
started in 1914, Sander was called up, and because of his age assigned to the medical
corps. He served in the field hospitals and triage stations located close to the battlefields
of France and Belgium for the four years of the war. He occasionally assisted an army
photographer and made a small number of his own photographs in a makeshift
darkroom. The effect of this experience was indelible and profound. Sander was near
his forty-second birthday when he returned to Anna and their three children. In his
absence, Anna had kept the studio business alive by such enterprising methods as
taking the camera, tripod, and plates to her childrens school, where she photographed
fathers of schoolmates leaving for the front. Germany was about to embark on more
than thirty years of upheaval, chaos, dictatorship, and catastrophic war. Sander was
about to embark on years of steadily heightening powers, when his vision would be
[11]

fulfilled, and his work accomplished. He had returned from the war energized, driven,
and determined.
Paramount among his objectives was the People of the 20th Century project. Sander
envisaged a vast composite portrait of humanity whose elements were some six
hundred individual portraits arranged in forty-five portfolios and catalogued in seven
volumes. The organization of the volumes was fluid, evolutionary, often inconsistent
and sometimes illogical. The emotional weight and penetrating insightfulness of the
individual photographs does not waver. They are precise representations, made with
quiet dignity by a compassionate eye and redolent of romanticism.
The years of the Weimar Republic (19191933), the parliamentary democracy
that replaced the empire, were August Sanders most prolific portrait-producing
period. He made his work of these fourteen years stand for the entire 20th century.
Sander sought out subjects he considered archetypes, exemplars of his present that
could be made to speak to posterity. He categorized and catalogued these exemplars
into bins whose labels he changed repeatedly as his capture of different types
expanded. To study Sanders work is to confront paradoxes. He lived in a period of
disorder so profound it produced Hitlers Third Reich, yet his serene portraits make
no obvious reference to the violence roaring outside his own door. The harrowing
conditions must have distressed the minds of his subjects even as they looked into his
lens. They do not show it.
People of the 20th Century, Sanders grand seven-volume portrait atlas, was in the
gestation phase during the Weimar years. It was to remain in unrealized schematic
form during his lifetime. As a precursor, Sander authored the book Face of Our Time
in 1929. A selection of sixty photographic portraits were arranged according to the
current version of his matrix of archetypical persons. The preface Faces, Images, and
Their Truth was written by Alfred Dblin whose influential novel Berlin
Alexanderplatz was published the same year. The Munich publisher Kurt Wolff, who
was Kafkas German publisher, produced a handsome volume. Coincidently Erich
Maria Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front appeared in book form in 1929. If
Sander read this nightmare from the trenches it must have reinvigorated his
war-front memories.
Face of Our Time, Sanders interim report on People of the 20th Century, is
thoroughly of the 20th centuryskeptical, objective, and lucid, while tinged with
romanticism. Though Face is a sequence of only sixty pictures among hundreds,
many are perfect examples of Sanders particular style. Here, the essential qualities of
his vision can be seen. Sander sorted his holdings into representative samples of
professions, trades, and social classes in Weimar Germany. Sanders people are often
photographed in their homes or workplaces. The environmental details thus
embedded in the pictures function as time tags for his sociological samples. The sixty
pictures build up, piece by piece, a virtual face of the Weimar Republic and by
extension, in Sanders view, the cultural, class, and economic history of the 20th
century.
Sander was not principally an exhibiting gallery photographer. He did not work
for the wall; he worked for the printed page. Framed photographs on a wall seemed
too much like individual windows, whereas bare images in a book could create
a stronger collective impression, a face rather than faces. A book of photographs
presents a linear, hence one-dimensional, sequence of images. As the viewer leaves
back-and-forth through the pages, a second, fugitive dimension is created, the
cerebral dimension of an integrated symphonic effect.
[12]

Face of Our Time enjoyed wide circulation and was the subject of numerous
contemporary reviews. A commonly expressed theme was Sanders portrait collection
either consciously interpreted or unconsciously reflected the chaotic struggle
between old and new forces in 1920s Germany. Reviewers concentrated their
attention on which of the pictures portrayed people clinging to the old Kaiserreich
and which portrayed those embracing the new republic. Evaluation of an individual
portrait was then made through the black and white filters of the right/left political
divide. That the portrait collection was a collective portrait went entirely unnoticed.
Sander must have felt chagrined that the ideologies then rampant in the Weimar
Republic prevented contemporary viewers from recognizing their own communal
image. There were some slight harbingers of the books future canonical status.
Walter Benjamins 1931 review statedSanders work is more than a picture book: it
is a training manual. Though not adequately appreciated or understood by his
contemporaries, Face of Our Time brought Sander national recognition. In August
1931, Sander was invited by West-German Radio (wdr) in Cologne to give a series
of six talks.
August Sander made no separation between his commercial portrait work and his
self-directed private assignments. He drew on both bodies of work when assembling
his encyclopedias of archetypes. The resulting sequences are stylistically seamless
because both kinds of work were conducted with the same interplay of psychology
and easy social dynamism. The paid portraitists most basic task is to make clients
look good. Sander must have used the dignity and kindness of his personality to
frame an atmosphere in which his subjects felt comfortable, alert, and self-aware but
not overly self-conscious. He was able to do this with every subject in all situations, be
it with a grand duke in his palace or indigent on the sidewalk. All of Sanders people
are endowed by his camera with a self-esteem they may or may not have possessed.
This important element in his work is its romantic vein, a portrayal of life as it could
be and should be. It runs continuously through what is on the surface an objective
cataloguing endeavour, but it was never primarily that. As a product of the Belle
poque, Sander seems to have clung to an interpretation of the contemporary social
framework as a half-medieval guild structure that held the romantic promise of
support, security, and personal fulfillment for everyone. This was far from the
inequitable realities of the Weimar Republic. His great portrait compendium does
not reflect an actually existing order, but one of his own imagining.
Sander was also possessed of an aggressive collectors instinct, as are most notable
photographers. When twins were born to Anna and August the boy did not survive,
but the girl, Sigrid, lived. Sander photographed Anna with baby Sigrid in her right
arm and the dead boy-child in the left. He titled it: My Wife in Joy and Sorrow. This
picture dramatically conflates objectivism and romanticism through the discipline
required to make such an image in emotionally charged circumstances and the
selecting of a moment when Anna looks utterly defeated.
In January 1933, a frail President Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler Chancellor of
Germany, and the twelve years of the Third Reich began. The effects of this
putative revolution were almost immediately felt in Cologne, even though the
Rhineland had been under military occupation since 1923 and would continue to be
so until 1936.
In 1934, Sanders eldest son Erich, a humanities student and member of the
Socialist Workers Party, was denounced and sentenced to ten years in prison. The
Third Reich forcibly entered Sanders life at 4 am on a chilly September morning
[13]

when the Gestapo raided the Lindenthal studio and took Erich away. The arrest was
precipitated when Sander assisted Erich by photographically reproducing socialist
pamphlets, some sheets of which fluttered into the street while drying on the rooftop.
Erich was incarcerated in a psychiatric prison where he was provided with books and
a desk, and work in the photographic department. Erich made a number of pictures
of fellow inmates, and used a priest to smuggle the images to Sander, who included
some of them in later versions of People. In his anger and grief after Erichs arrest,
Sander took refuge in landscape and architectural subjects.
In November 1936, just two years after Erichs imprisonment, the Reich Chamber
of Visual Arts banned Face of Our Time. By then the book had been in print for seven
years. Sanders Munich publisher Kurt Wolff ceased all operations. Wolffs entire
catalogue was banned, his inventory confiscated, and all printing plates destroyed. It
remains unclear what part Sanders book played in this wholesale repression. Both
Wolff and Alfred Dblin, the author of Faces introduction, were from assimilated
Jewish-German families. It is clear that Sanders socially broad compendium of
archetypes scarcely conformed to the Aryan stereotypes then demanded by the
authorities. Sanders labours on People of the 20th Century were curtailed by this
setback. However, he did continue to re-orchestrate and refine the categories of his
portrait atlas and occasionally to add to his bank of images.
Few people can ever see what is coming at them. The signs are at first imperceptible and by the time they are recognized the previously far away catastrophe is
unstoppable. Sander, ever the astute observer, may well have read the signs and took
action to incorporate the signifiers of them into his lexicon of archetypical persons.
In 1937, with the book banning and imprisonment of Erich weighing heavily upon
him, he photographed an ss captain on the platform of the Cologne railroad station
with the gothic cathedral as background. The portrait clearly foreshadows Hannah
Arendts concept of the banality of evil. The officer, with his deaths head hat-badge,
and his avuncular expression looks out at the viewer with benign equanimity. The
Hauptsturmfhrer ordered fifty prints from Sander. As extreme as the circumstances
of the portrait session must have been, Sanders ability to collude with his subject did
not waver. As was always his way, he never feared that allowing the sitter to appear in
a noble light would render the art shallow.
Sanders premonitions of calamitous adversity, triggered by his reading of the
signs all about him, impelled him to alter the emphasis of his photographic practice.
The collecting for People of the 20th Century slowed while landscape and
architectural work accelerated. Sander had been assembling cityscapes and
architectural details of his adopted home of Cologne since 1920. In the last years of
the 1930s he assiduously pursued his aesthetic convictions in photographs of the city.
Could he have apprehended its approaching near total destruction? The pictures,
divided into sixteen portfolios, would become Cologne As It Was when completed in
1952. August Sander has done for Cologne what Eugene Atget did for Paris and Josef
Sudek did for Prague.
When wwii commenced on September 1, 1939, his daughter Sigrid was living in
England, his son Gunther was drafted into the Wehrmacht, and Erich was still
incarcerated. Sander was 62 years of age. Erich implored his parents to move out of
Cologne. Uncharacteristically Sander took his sons advice. He and Anna acquired a
dilapidated farmhouse in Kuchhausen, a Westerwald village about 55 miles from the
city. As the first bombs were falling on the city, Sander was able to move 40,000 of his
most precious negatives and some of his darkroom equipment to the Westerwald. The
[14]

remaining 30,000 negatives were stored in sealed metal boxes in the cellar of the
Drener Strasse studio.
August and Anna remained in Kuchhausen for the war years and were largely
safe from the bombs. Sanders belief in his work remained unbroken, and he
endeavoured to carry on under difficult conditions and with improvised equipment.
The farmhouse was not electrified so Sander jury-rigged an old view camera to
function as an enlarger using the sun as its light source. He roamed the countryside,
contemplating the daily and seasonal variations in the landscape, and when a
particular scene triggered an alignment with his German romantic sensibilities, he
meticulously adjusted his camera and created what he would have called a
Landschaft. Sander thought of these works as constructions, as opposed to windows
framing the land. They are suffused with the personal, the political, and a powerful
sense of place, space and time.
As he waited out the war in bucolic Kuchhausen, Sander did not suspend his work
on, or thoughts of, People of the 20th Century. He added to his inventory of
archetypes whenever an opportunity arose. Sander was living through a maelstrom of
frightening incidents; the future was entirely illegible. This is painfully clear in his
1940 photograph of a godlike soldier of the Wehrmacht posed in front of a halftimbered Westerwald barnserene in his polished chin-strapped helmet, but
unsettled by some unknown sense of loss flickering in his eyes. The viewer of this
photograph cannot un-see the disaster in which, we know, he is about to be a
participant. His calm is shocking to us now, particularly when his belt-buckle motto
Gott Mit Uns is noticed.
Tragedy struck August and Anna just before the end of the war. With Erichs
ten-year prison sentence almost fully served, he suffered a ruptured appendix. The
guards refused to send him to hospital until it was too late. Erich died on March 23,
1944.
The negatives stored in the Lindenthal cellar miraculously survived all the air
raids though the building itself was destroyed. In 1946, with the city under Allied
occupation, looters set fire to the ruined house, and the negatives were consumed.
Sander wrote his daughter Sigridwho waited out the war in Icelandof his
grief and anger, though he concluded with positive thoughts about a rejuvenated
creative spirit. Gunther lived, made his way west from Russia, and surrendered to the
Americans. Later Sander wrote, But because the (Kuchhausen) negative materials
survived, I was able to add new things and continue my work, turning my experiences
to good account, so that I hope to be able to complete the work if my energy holds out
and I have the means.
After 1946, Sander continued his portrait collecting efforts at a much reduced
pace. He invested much time and effort in reorganizing his print and negative
archives while again revamping the categories of archetypes for People of the 20th
Century. In the immediate post-war years Sander concentrated on two distinguished
and unique documentary projects which were devoted to his adopted home, Cologne.
His accumulation of photographs of pre-war Cologne now had obvious historical
relevance. The city had burned so fiercely that the orange glow could be seen beyond
the Dutch coast. Sanders pictures of Cologne from the 20s and 30s were not made for
architectural stocktaking purposes. They were made for purely aesthetic motivations
as an interpretative compendium of cultural history. The work was titled Cologne As
It Was. The entire set of sixteen portfolios was purchased by the city administration
for the significant sum of twenty-five thousand marks. This not only provided for
[15]

Sanders old age, but resulted in his work being rediscovered by a wider public and a
reawakening of interest in professional curatorial circles. In 2009 the Klnisches
Stadtmuseum published a magnificently printed large-format volume of Cologne As
It Was.
In the second documentary project, in powerful and moving photographs, Sander
portrayed the city after its destruction so as to be, as he put ita hard and pitiless
reminder to everyone in our own time and in times to come, a warning [] for all times
in political matters. Sander, now seventy years old, clambered amongst the ruins of
Cologne to photograph in his customary graceful and ennobling style, sad scenes such
as the Hohenzollern Bridge collapsed into the Rhine and a sea of shells of buildings
in aerial-style shots taken from the still standing spires of the citys gothic cathedral.
The corpse-like images with their resurrectionist sub-text are solemnly haunting. In
1985 the pictures reappeared phoenix-like in book form as The Destruction of Cologne
with commentary by Heinrich Bll and a text by Sander ironically and bitterly
prefaced with a quotation from Adolf Hitler.
August Sanders end began in 1957 with the death of Anna, his wife of fifty-five
years, in Kuchhausen. Her final message to him was an apology for leaving him alone.
With her death, Sander lost not only the central pivot of his life, but the most
valuable and loyal supporter of his lifes work. Without Anna he would not have been
able to realize his photography as fully as he did.
Sander produced a portrait album in 1962 that he titled Mirror of the Germans. It
is essentially a slightly expanded and updated edition of Face of Our Time. Comprised
of eighty pictures, Mirror is a re-balancing of the sixty in Face. Sander used the
thirty-three years between the publication of the two books to reflect on the
recapitulation that is the second. Though Mirror must have assuaged Sanders anger
over the banning of Face, Face remains his canonical photo book.
August Sander died on 20 April 1964 in Cologne of a stroke at age 87. People of
the 20th Century was never brought to fruition in Sanders lifetime. His legacy to the
ages is the massive archive of memorable prints and numerous schematics for the
unrealized publication: People. It was left to his posthumous collaborators to
implement his vision. In this he was blessed by dedicated and creative interpreters of
his intentions. Three full-scale creations of People have been made. Each is different,
owing to the many variations in plans that Sander bequeathed to his artistic legatees.
The variations included the designation and number of the categories of archetypes,
as well as the individual prints assigned to them. All three productions of People were
first published in German and shortly afterward in English.
The first to appear in 1971 was Men Without Masks (Faces of Germany 19101938)
by Sanders son Gunther, with a penetrating foreword by Golo Mann. The title page
of the book reads People of the 20th Century. It was beautifully printed by the Swiss
publisher C.J. Bucher. Each major section of this version of Sanders portrait
encyclopedia is preceded by fold-out pages on which small images of the plates to
follow are reproduced. This device allows the books viewer to immediately grasp the
scope of each section and to visually understand the meaning of its title. As well, the
matrix of miniatures reinforces the sense of cohesion individual images in each
section are meant to create. Associations between images are easier to make because
the page-by-page adjacencies of the section are informed by a previous overview of
the whole.
Gunther Sanders essay on his father is, of course, uniquehe grew up in the
Cologne house/studio and was trained, as were his mother, brother, and sister, in
[16]

photographic technique. He had walked home from the Winter War; once back in
Kuchhausen he assisted his father in the darkroom. His is a biographical view from
inside the Sander household. It is more than that though. Gunther had a very good
eye. His image selection and sequencing of Men Without Masks is unsurpassed in
coherency of subtle harmonies and in sensitivity to cinema-like sequencing.
Gunthers essay contains many perceptive insights into the nature of his fathers
talent. He felicitously described this as: a skill which enabled him to make his subjects
unconsciously interpret their own characters.
The second synthesis of People of the 20th Century was published by Schirmer/
Mosel in 1980. This reconstruction is by Ulrich Keller, professor of art history at
University of California at Santa Barbara, in collaboration with Gunther Sander.
Keller based his work on Sanders written specifications of his projections for People,
the extant collection of printed photographs, as well as the archive of negatives. The
1986 mit English edition uses a subtitle, Portrait Photographs 18921952, to emphasize
the expansion in time-frame to include Imperial Germany, the Third Reich, and the
early Federal Republic. Kellers 62-page illustrated essay is comprehensive,
resourceful, and valuable. In it he writes about Sanders photographic aesthetic, his
studio practices, his perceptions of class structure, his virtuosic camera and darkroom
techniques and his concept of portraiture.
Ulrich Kellers rendition of People organizes four hundred thirty-one Sander
portraits into seven clusters entitled Farmers, Workers, Women, Occupations, Artists,
The Big City, and The Last People. Distributed among these seven clusters are 45
portfolios or sub-groupings. This presentation adheres closely to Sanders later
organizational constructs. Keller relinquishes control to Sander, accepting all the
inconsistencies, quirks, and illogic of his system of classification of archetypes. The
grandeur and nobility of Sanders art transcend these typological niceties.
On 17 November 2001, the 125th anniversary of August Sanders birth, People of
the 20th Century was published for the third time. This version conforms with
exactitude and scope to Sanders last set of specifications (1954) for the work.
Previously, in 1992, the Photographic Collection of the sk Cultural Foundation in
Cologne had acquired the August Sander Archive from Gerd Sander, the
photographers grandson. The archive was then expanded by acquisitions of Sander`s
work from the German Society for Photography.
This construction of People is the work of Susanne Lange, director of the
foundation, and her numerous colleagues and collaborators including Gerd Sander.
This edition has a separate volume for each of Sanders seven major categories of
archetypes. The volume titles are very similar to those used by Ulrich Keller and
Gunther Sander in their 1980 edition. Individual volumes give tactile reinforcement
to the sense of Sanders 1954 structure of People. Susanne Lange added 180 new
pictures, most of which had never appeared before, and some of which had to be
printed from the original negatives. The seven volumes with their six hundred and
nineteen portraits are magisterial and definitive. Sander, who had worked so long for
the printed page, received albeit posthumously, his ultimate and just reward. People,
in seven volumes, is an objective memorial to the 20th century, suffused with a
romantics love of humankind.
George Steeves

[17]

 2. Three Generations of the Family 1912/1927

 7. Boy on a Horse c.19201928/1955

 9. Middle-class Children c. 1920 25

 11. Society Lady (Mrs. Curtius, Cologne) 1923/c.193249

 15. Mother and Daughter (Helene Abelen with Daughter Josepha) 1926/1928

1923
m id d l e - cla s s family, c ologne, 1923
It is now ninety years since Sander exposed the glass plate for this photograph. We see
the result of his vision with the social eyes of our own time. We cannot do otherwise. The
compositional and tonal elements remain indelibly Sanders. This is the magic of
photographic communication. We are here and he was there with his time-slicing,
time-transporting, one-eyed box.
The decor and clothes are frozen-in-amber. The expressions, body language, and
comportment are not. They reach out to us across the near century.
The pendants of the three figures are masterfully placed against the house that is the
emblem of their middle-class status. The window sill divides heads from bodies. Bodies
are earth-anchored. Heads are framed by glass encased embrasures. By this device the
three overlapping figures are individuated. The frame encloses a group portrait and this
is our first impression. Soon we resolve this overall field of view into three individual
images of daughter, mother, and father.
Father does not look at us. He is in the elementary phase of self-portrayal. He thinks
hes fooling the camera. It doesnt work. We see an evasive looking man with a selfsatisfied half-smirk.
Mother fearlessly looks directly down the lens-barrel of the camera. Her expression
speaks volumes. In it she passes on to us with her eyes her acceptance of the fathers
pretensions and unrealistic expectations. With her tightened mouth she conveys her
misgivings about her recently pubescent daughter.
Daughter is the most expressive of the three figures both in posture and facial
expression. She has tellingly positioned herself slightly away from her parents. She
stands contrapposto with right knee bent under her dress and foot lightly touching the
garden border. Daughter is about to propel herself forward. She is the coming force in
the family, she says to us. Mother is somewhat aware of the tilting family dynamic, but
Father is not. The flapper-like dropped-waist dress with hip-slung belt is advertising the
girls budding sexuality and the extravagant application of kohl eye-makeup reinforces
that impression.
The most telling element of the entire composition is that the daughter has stuck her
left arm into the adjacent vegetation, the arm her parents cannot see. She is announcing
to the camera that she is departing the garden. The middle-class family is about to
transform.
gs

 13. Middle-class Family, Cologne 1923/1958

 17. The Cycling Club c. 1927/1955

[23]

 19. Bricklayer 1928/before 1971

 23. Berlin Coal Porter 1929/c.19291933

 26. Gypsy c.193035/c.1955

 18. Painter (H. Hoerle, 18951936) 1928/before 1938

 28. Secretary at West German Radio, Cologne 1931/1990

 24. Customs Officials, Hamburg 1929/1958

 25. Grand Duke, Ernst Ludwig von Hessen und bei Rhein 1930/1955

 30. Allianz, Cologne c.19361938

My Afternoon with
August Sander
Translated from the
papers of Generalmajor
Helmuth Stieff

n the late spring of 1938, I joined the Army General Staff, the okh. At the
age of 37, I was the Wehrmachts youngest general. My know-how concerned
organizational matters, logistics, and coordination, not directly related to combat
command. Wearing my new uniform, and proud of the double red stripes running
down the trouser legs, I set off from Berlin in June for a tour of inspection of army
installations in the Rhineland. I began in Kln (Cologne) where the army facilities
had been, not so long ago, abandoned by the Allied occupiers. Over dinner with fellow
officers I solicited a recommendation for a photographic portrait studio. I wanted to
commemorate my promotion for my wife and my parents in Deutsch Eylau (West
Prussia). The name August Sander was enthusiastically endorsed by a brother
officer, and my adjutant made an appointment the next day.
On a warm May afternoon the staff car rolled to a stop under a full-blooming
horse chestnut tree on a side-street opposite a building bearing in gold on black a sign,
lichtbildwerkstatt
(LightPicture
Picture
Worksh august
op) august
sanThe Lindenthal
lichtbildwerkstatt (Light
(Light
Picture
Worksh
sander.
Workshop)
district portrait studio must have once been a commercial shop with living quarters
on the second and third floors. Now the plate glass display windows were draped with
plain black curtains. I was greeted warmly at the front door by Sander and his wife
Anna and welcomed into their home as if a distant relative.
Sander was of small stature, as am I. He was about my fathers age. Sander
dressed in a dapper, slightly foppish manner. I was immediately aware of the
intensity of his piercing gaze, as if he had been staring at people for so long that he
was unaware of its effect on others. Anna was peppy and very much of the moment,
her warmth and optimism palpable. We ascended to a sitting room on the second floor
with windows looking down on a small, carefully tended garden. It was a peaceful
and silent placeold-fashioned furnishings, book-lined walls, musical instruments,
art worksdie Avantgardea confident calico cat. We talked with an easy social
grace. Anna served a pot of black-currant tea and a seed cake. The talk started out
small and careful. These were delicate times in our beloved Fatherland. The Hegelian
Zeitgeist of my generation was fearlessly affirmative, but the Sanders was much
more tentative, tending to wariness with a gloss of foreboding. Sander seemed as
though he was an affable priest of some unknown recondite religion. There was a
deep quiet in him, a lucid authority. I sensed the weight of his grave experiences,
though they were lightly worn by him. The conversation touched tangentially on our
places of origin, tastes in music and literature, and by inference only, political stability
and economic prosperity. Unstated, but nevertheless in the air, was August and Annas
sense of dreadthe next war was coming and I had more reasons than most to know
that. More than an hour slipped seamlessly by; I had almost forgotten the purpose of
my visit.
Herr General, its time to make your picture. For that we go upstairs.
[37]

On the third floor he and I walked through his darkroom, which looked to me like
a university laboratory, and then into what he called the posing room. At first, it
looked like a sparser version of the sitting room downstairsless furniture (two
elegant old chairs and a four-seat sofa), bigger paintings, and a sumptuous carpet.
Then, I noticed the draperies. Each of the four walls had a dark wooden valence along
its upper edge containing curtains of differing hues that could be pulled across by
drawstrings. While downstairs Anna had carried most of the conversation, here in
Sanders workroom he transformedgently directorial, somewhat school-masterly,
and energized with enthusiasm. He drew a set of drapes across the end wall, where
the windows were obliquely shining, the velvety fabric just slightly darker than
my field-grey uniform. Sanders camera was old-fashioned, made of wood, tripodmounted, with a big brass lens. He manipulated its various adjustments instinctively.
Please sit in this nice antique chair from the Westerwald. He canted the chair
towards the window, near but not in the sunlight. At a fair distance away, it seemed,
the camera was given a few final adjustments. Then, from the other side of the room,
he rolled a massive Cheval mirror, placing it somewhat forward of the camera. It was
articulated so I could see the entire area in which I was sitting. The mirror was the
image.
This is the self-presentation, the introductory phase of the portrait-making
process. How we wish to be seen by others. Dont look at me. Dont look at the lens.
Look in the mirror and silently tell yourself, this is the visual residue of how I will be
remembered. I did as instructed. This was easily accomplished as the mirror bridged
the distance to the camera . Sanders way of floating into this moment of picturemaking seemed to delicately imply he knew my secrets, he saw into my heart, and my
reflection was safe with him. I felt the natural truthfulness of the man, his warmth
of heart, his compassion. He slid the glass plate holder into the back of the camera
and exposed it for several seconds. After that, a second exposure, but in a standing
position. Sander talked as if Id willed myself into his camera, and he was merely a
facilitator.
Sander pulled the two open-backed chairs close to the window.
Lets have a nice quiet talk. He imparted some of his thoughts on the meaning
of portraiture. Well seen photographs should have enough strength to resist the
aggression of ideas. We stand for our times and our place.
In the context of Third Reich conversations such statements had to be taken
as subtly resistive or perhaps subversive. Against the backdrop of this declaration,
bordering on sedition, Sander passionately described his magnum opus. He told me
that for more than two decades he had been amassing a collection of photographic
portraits, both commercial and self-directed, with the objective of constructing a
matrix of humanitys essence.
I am an objective romantic, a realist. I believe in the purifying power of craving
for the other side of outward appearance. I call it the image on the other side of the
mirror. This is the third dimension of the checkerboard matrix of my pictures.
I was fascinated by and absorbed with his enthusiasms. Obsession is freedom, I
realizedif one is driven and selfish enough. The heartfelt sermon ceased. I didnt
understand his assertions, but I had the feeling that with more thought I would.
Sander fixed me with a maniacal ferocity for the first time, though he had been
studying me covertly ever since I walked in the front door.
Herr General would you agree to enter my menagerie? I want to make a
situational portrait of you, out-of-doors, here in Lindenthal.
[38]

Sander telephoned neighbour Frau Suzanne Schwan, asking to use the front
steps of her house to make a photograph; his tone suggested this wasnt an unusual
request.
With the black focusing cloth and view camera on his shoulder, we made our

way carefully down the stairs to street level. Upon sight of us exiting the studio my
adjutant and driver, who had been waiting for two hours, moved the grey Mercedes
staff car from the side street to the doorway. Passersby crossed the street, and small
boys in short pants came as close as they dared. Sander reassured them in a fatherly
way. I ordered the men to wait in the staff car. Kln was then known as a brown city,
because of a heavy Sturmabteilung (brown-uniformed Nazi paramilitaries) presence.
The chance of a violent street incident was real. They loathed the regular army,
believing it complicit in The Night of the Long Knives. Sander on the pavement
now seemed more in his element than in the studio.
Years in the darkroom make outdoors so marvelous. He assessed the sky and
its illumination of things. It was gauzy and pearlescent. My kind of light, Herr
General, a uranium sky.
Just around the corner from the studio, Frau Suzanne Schwan was waiting for us
at the top of her elegantly curved front-staircase and its wrought-iron balustrade. She,
like Sanders lively wife Anna, was maternally welcoming and projected a luminous
hopefulness. I tried not to notice that her white house-dress was colourfully adorned
with cooking stains. The white-haired Frau Schwan coquettishly teased Sander in a
Scandinavian accent, telling him that he should bring such distinguished guests more
frequently. She laughed in a deep-throated robust way and left us to our task. Sander
asked me to pose on one particular step of the staircase, then with graceful precision,
he adjusted his complex camera using a pocket spirit-level. The cameras tripod was
about six meters away from where I stood. The plate holder was inserted, and Sander
wearily ran his fingers through his fine grey hair, and came up the stairs to me.
General Stieff, I have observed that you have a straight-mouth smile, and when
pensive you clasp your right hand over the left holding a cigarette. Please do this for
the camera. Also bend your elbows slightly upward so your German Cross in Gold
catches the light. And if you wouldnt mind, also slightly rumple your uniform. He
then tiptoed back to his camera and with gestures resembling those of an orchestra
conductor, silently directed me into the suggested pose. The cameras shutter was
activated, its snick quite audible.
Sander smiled broadly. Theres a tingle in the tip of my shutter finger when a
good frame is cast. Frau Schwan looked down on the scene from the second storey of
her house, hands on her ample hips. The staff car approached, gliding to a stop at the
curb just in front of Frau Schwans staircase. The adjutant opened the rear door and
saluted. I looked down the street at Sander, standing there with his left hand resting
on the wooden camera, looking as alone as anyone could ever be. I saluted him, waved
goodbye, and turned to get in the car. Sander came briskly forward, grasped my right
hand in both of his.
May God protect you with His hand. What a puzzling and soulful man.
My inspection of army facilities around the country continued for another
three weeks or so. I was absorbed by the thousands of details required to integrate
and coordinate what I intended to make the best land army in the world. The tour
concluded in Hanover. I telephoned to my wife, Ottilie, in the Grunewald suburb of
Berlin, that I would be arriving home the next afternoon, and the twelve-cylinder
Mercedes would soon be barreling down the Reichsautobahn on a due east course.
To be away from Ottilie, away from home, was the most painful part of army life,
[39]

however rewarding it was in other ways. I strode through the front door of our house
in the woods, my arms loaded with gift-wrapped presentsa Brahms Rhapsody (the
g-minor I recall) was wafting through the white-on-white interior. In the music room
at the garden end of the house, Ottilie sat at the Bechstein, her straight back to me.
Abundant flowers stood on the piano, the translucent drapes billowing into the room
with the summer breeze. She did not stop playing. The romantic scene had been
set and must be enjoyed to the end. On the last lingering note, Ottilie momentarily
slumped her shoulders, then twisted up and around from the piano bench. I saw her
there, as if I were Sanders camera. For a second wished I was. Ottilie, in a floorlength sheer silk gown, came forward, she a head taller than me. Life, for me, at this
point in time and place, was crushingly wondrous in its heroic fragility.
That evening we attended a glittering formal reception at the Prussian Officers
Casino in central Berlin. I remember going up the left side of the twin marble
staircase side-by-side with Ottilie, the huge painting of the Fhrer looming above us.
In the majestic second-floor rooms military men in dress uniforms danced with the
ladies, drank champagne, and conversed warily with fellow officers. Those with solid
National Socialist Party pedigrees conversed more freely than the others.
The Fhrer last night stated that the geniality, diligence, and steadfastness of
the German people would be harnessed for works of peace and human culture.
Ottilie whispered, An unattainable ideal.
The band played cheerfully on, while in the quieter adjoining corridors
conversations happened by chance encounter.
I was delighted to meet an old friend from the military academy,
Infanteriesschule Mnchen, who was now serving in the Abwehr (army
intelligence). We chatted with our wives in quartet fashion. I mentioned my
extraordinary experience in Kln, the portrait session with August Sander. My
friend from the Abwehr raised his left eyebrow, Helmuth. Did you not know that
Herr Sanders book, Face of Our Time, has been banned and his son is installed
in an insane asylum for Communist activities?You should be more careful my
friend... Ill send you a copy of his book by dispatch-rider.
Conversation ceased, and was replaced by physical expressions of social unease.
Ottilie fluttered her pianists fingers as if to say: Cest la vie, mon chri. She wiped a
lipstick smear from the rim of her champagne glass.
When I returned home from army headquarters in the Bendlerblock the next
evening, Ottilie dramatically handed me a carefully wrapped parcel stamped
Reichspost Kln. Sander had delivered his photographs. Over drinks in the music
room the package was carefully unwrapped. The three proof-prints were spread out
on the lid of the piano: two in the studio and the one at Frau Schwans. Ottilie is a
woman of immediate, quick-thinking opinions. The interior portraits she pronounced
beautifully quiet.
And of the out-of-doors staircase photograph, Helmuthchen is this really a
picture of you? My darling you look like youve been through the war already! We
then ate a light meal.The after-weight of the days work descended on me. Ottilie
removed Sanders prints from the piano. She knew what music would soothe, and
gently played Bachs Art of the Fugue. I knew this music well. As the first passages
progressed through their contrapuntal complications I mentally recapitulated
ongoing army affairs, but as the fugal resolutions progressed my mind wandered
back to Sanders photographs. What did they mean? They burned into my mental
remembrance.
[40]

Face of Our Time arrived on Sunday morning, in an official Abwehr dispatch case
with a lead seal. The armed motorcycle rider was noticed by our neighbours.
Sanders book was not at all what I expected. The dust-jacket was heavily
modernist in design whereas the book itself was austerely simple: a bright yellow
linen binding with a debossed shield on the front cover bearing an icon of a face.
The pages included an introduction by Alfred Dblin, the acclaimed author of Berlin
Alexanderplatz, and sixty photographic reproductions with curt titles. In the quiet
of the morning, I read Dblins clinical psychiatrists analysis of Sanders work, but
spent most of the precious calm going back and forth among the plates. As I slowly
did this I recalled Sanders words when we sat by the window in his studio: the
matrix concept of serial portraits, the other side of the mirror, and the photograph as
perceptual vehicle. I felt compelled to write him a letter to be included with our order
for finished prints. Ottilie requested a print made on Frau Schwans staircase and of a
special size so as to fit into an antique family frame: For my piano, Helmuthchen, when
youre away from me.
03 Juli 1938
Sehr geehrter Herr Sander,
I write you on this splendid Sunday from a Berlin in which order has been restored,
and someday soon harmony may be regained. My wife Ottilie and I are greatly
pleased with all three of the proof prints. They are so alive. The order form for
finished prints and payment are enclosed.
The studio photographs with their canonical poses show the face that I present
to the world, my self-presentation, as you have saidyour camera work has both
intensified and refined what I aspire to project. The outdoors photograph at Frau
Schwans house is a face I hardly know, but of which I completely accept the validity,
a face I will surely have in the fullness of time. Ottilie is captivated by it.
I have obtained a copy of your book. It makes manifest the principles you
elucidated in your studio. I congratulate you on your achievement.
I am a man as you are, lost in history.
Mit besten Gren

historical note: Helmuth Stieff was a serving German army Generalmajor. He

joined the German officers resistance against Hitler in 1944. He was arrested on 21
July of that year at the Wolf s Lair, the Fhrers fortified headquarters in East Prussia,
immediately after the failed assassination attempt on Hitlers life on 20 July. He was
brutally interrogated under torture and resisted all attempts to extract the names of fellow
conspirators.
Helmuth Stieff was sentenced to death and was slowly hanged by piano wire at
Pltzensee prison in Berlin on 8 August, 1944.

gs
[41]

Works in the Exhibition

All photographs are gelatin
silver prints and were lent by
the National Gallery of Canada
unless otherwise indicated. Where
dates are shown separated by a
virgule, the first is the date of
the negative and the second the
date of the print. Dimensions in
centimetres appear height
before width.
1

The Man of the Soil

1910/1927
22.9 x 18.5 (sight)
Purchased 1983
2

Three Generations
of the Family
1912/1927
14.8 x 21.4 (sight)
Purchased 1983
3

The Philosopher
1913 /1927
22.9 x 18.3 (sight)
Purchased 1983
4

The Wise One

1913 /1927
23.5 x 17.3 (sight)
Purchased 1983
5

Military Contrast (France)

1915 / after 1926
29.1 x 23.2
Purchased 1985
6

Captain of the Reserves

(Alsace-Lorraine)
1915 /c. 1955
28.6 x 21.3
Purchased 1986
[43]

Boy on a Horse
c.19201928/1955
28.9 x 23
Purchased 1986
8

Master Tailor
c. 19201925 /c. 1955
22.3 x 29.1
Purchased 1987
9

Middle-class Children
19201925
Sheet: 15.6 x 10.9
Image: 15.6 x 10.9
Gift of Gerd Sander, New York, 1991
10

Bohemians (Willi Bongard,

Gottfried Brockmann)
19221925
21.9 x 24.1
Purchased 1986
11

Society Lady (Mrs. Curtius, Cologne)

1923/c.193249
22.9 x 17.5
Purchased 1985
12

Teacher and Leader of

Wandervogel Youth Movement
1923/c. 1955
28.6 x 22.3
Purchased 1986
13

Middle-class Family, Cologne

1923 /1958
(Print heightened by
removal of emulsion)
49.4 x 37.2
Purchased 1987
14

Country Girls
c. 1925
18.4 x 11.4 (sight)
Collection of Marilyn Lawson

[44]

15

Mother and Daughter (Helene

Abelen with Daughter Josepha)
1926/1928
31.3 x 23.9 (approx.)
Purchased 1986
16

Ludwig E. Ronig and his Wife

c.192627/c. 1955
Sheet: 29.8 x 26.6
Image: 23.9 x 22.5 (sight)
Purchased 1987
17

The Cycling Club

c. 1927/1955
(with black ink border)
20.9 x 26.6
Purchased 1987
18

Painter (H. Hoerle, 18951936)

1928/ before 1938
61 x 48.4
Purchased 1989
19

Bricklayer
1928/ before 1971
Sheet: 30.4 x 24
Image: 29.6 x 23.3
Purchased 1977
20

Cave near Schleiden, Eifel

1929 /c. 1955
48 x 29.7
Purchased 1986
21

Grungurtel Park, Cologne

c. 19291933
Sheet: 17 x 22.8
Image: 16.9 x 22.7
Purchased 1990
22

Grungurtel Park, Cologne

c. 19291933
16 x 23.1
Purchased 1986
23

Berlin Coal Porter

1929 /c. 19291933
23.8 x 15.5 (sight)
Purchased 1979
[45]

24

Customs Officials, Hamburg

1929/1958
50.3 x 37.1
Purchased 1989
25

Grand Duke, Ernst Ludwig

von Hessen und bei Rhein
1930/1955
29.3 x 21.2
Purchased 1986
26

Gypsy
c.193035/c. 1955
27.1 x 20.1
Purchased 1987
27

Jerusalem Pilgrim
1930/c. 1955
(with black ink border)
29.2 x 19.9
Purchased 1986
28

Secretary at West German

Radio, Cologne
1931/1990
Sheet: 25.9 x 17
Image: 25.7 x 16.8
Purchased 2001
29
Young Woman in Riding Attire
1932/c.1955
29.1 x 20.5
Purchased 1976
30

Allianz, Cologne
c.19361938
22.3 x 17
Purchased 1979
31

Interior of Sanders House, Cologne

1938/printed later
23.9 x 18
Purchased 1985
32

Self-portrait
1942
Sheet: 22.8 x 16.4
Image: 22.6 x 16.4
Purchased 1989
[46]

Bibliography

sander, August. Antlitz der Zeit. Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts. With an introduction by
Alfred Dblin. First Edition, Munich: Wolf, 1929.
sander, August. Deutsche Land-Deutsche Volk Volume 3: Das Siebengebirge. Rothenfelde:
Holzwarth, 1934.
lutzeler, Heinrich. August Sander. Deutschenspiegel. Gtersloh: Sigbert Mohn Verlag, 1962.
jay, Bill, ed. August Sander men of the twentieth century. Creative Camera November 1969
Number 65: 400403.
porter, Allan, ed. August Sander Lewis W. Hine & Descendents. Camera June 1971 Number
6: 615.
sander, Gunther. Men Without Masks. Faces of Germany 19101938. With foreword by Golo
Mann. Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1973.
kemp, Wolfgang. August Sander. Rheinlandschaften. Photographien 19291946. With text by
Wolfgang Kemp. Munich: Schirmer-Mosel, 1975.
kramer, Robert. August Sander. Photographs of an Epoch 19041959. New York: Aperture, 1980.
ranke, Winfried, ed. August Sander. Die Zerstrung Klns. With texts by Heinrich Bll and W.
Ranke. Munich: Schirmer-Mosel, 1985.
sander, Gunther, ed. August Sander: Citizens of the Twentieth Century. Portrait Photographs
18921952. With essay by Ulrich Keller. Cambridge, Massachusetts: mit Press, 1986.
sander, Gerd, ed. August Sander. With texts by Susanne Lange and Christoph Schreier.
Cologne and London: sk Stiftung Kultur, Kln and National Portrait Gallery, 1997.
lange, Susanne, ed. August Sander. Landschaften. With text by Olivier Lugon. Cologne: sk
Stiftung Kultur, Kln and Schirmer-Mosel, 1999.
heiting, Manfred, ed. August Sander 18761964. With essay by Susanne Lange. Cologne:
Taschen Verlag, 1999.
naef, Weston, ed. Portrait of a People: The Photographs of August Sander. With contributions
by Hilla Becher, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Ulrich Keller, et al. Los Angles: J. Paul Getty
Museum, 2000.

fernandez,
Nacho, Ed. August Sander: Retratos. La mujer en el proyecto Hombres del Siglo XX.
With texts by Susanne Lange, Juan Manuel Bonet, and Andreu Hernndez. Madrid: Brizzolis,
2002.
lange, Susanne, Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, and Gerd Sander eds. August Sander. People of the
20th Century. vol. 1: The Farmer, vol. 2: The Skilled Tradesman, vol. 3: The Woman, vol. 4:
Classes and Professions, vol. 5: The Artists, vol. 6: The City, vol. 7: The Last People. Cologne:
sk Stiftung Kultur, Kln, 2002.
rubinfien, Leo. The Mask Behind the Face. Art in America June/July (2004): 96105.
uecker, Matthais The Face of the Weimar Republic Photography, Physiognomy, and
Propaganda in Weimar Germany. Monatshefte Winter (2007); 469484.
schafke, Werner, ed. Sander, August. Kln Wie Es War. With text by Rita Wagner. Cologne:
Klnisches Stadtmuseum and Emons, 2009.
conrath-scholl, Gabriele, ed. August Sander: Seeing, Observing and Thinking. With the
manuscript of a radio lecture by August Sander. Munich: sk Stiftung Kultur, Kln and
Schirmer-Mosel, 2009.
[47]

msvu Art Gallery

Mount Saint Vincent University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
b3m 2j6
www.msvuart.ca
Published on the occasion of the exhibition
August Sander: Objective Romantic, held from
7 September through 20 October 2013 at
Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery.
Copyright George Steeves in his texts,
the National Gallery of Canada in the
reproductions of August Sanders photographs,
and msvu Art Gallery in the publication.
Photographs: August Sander images courtesy
of the National Gallery of Canada
Editor: Megan MacKay
Design: Robert Tombs
Printing: The Lowe-Martin Group
Distribution: abc Art Books Canada
front cover: August Sander, Secretary at
West German Radio, Cologne, 1931 /1990
frontispiece: August Sander, Self-portrait,
1942
back cover: August Sander, Painter
(H. Hoerle, 18951936), 1928/ before 1938