August Sander: Persecuted / Persecutors: People of the 20th Century

Sander's portraits have influenced generations of photographers from Walker Evans to Rineke Dijkstra

A founding father of the documentary style, August Sander is the creator of many iconic 20th-century photographs. Toward the end of World War I, while working from his studio in Cologne, Sander began what would become his life's work: a photographic portrait of German society under the Weimar Republic. He called this endeavor People of the 20th Century. While his first publication was banned from sale in 1936 by the Nazi government, around 1938 Sander began taking identity photographs for persecuted Jews. During World War II he photographed migrant workers; Sander included these images, alongside some taken by his son Erich from the prison where he would die in 1944, plus portraits of National Socialists made before and during the war, in People of the 20th Century.

Sander was unable to publish his monumental work during his lifetime, and these photographs are published together for the first time here, along with contact prints, letters and details about the lives of those photographed. They are portraits of dignified men and women, victims of an ideology taking their rightful place as "People of the 20th Century" in defiance of Nazi efforts to ostracize them.

The son of a miner from Herdorf, Germany, August Sander (1876–1964) moved to Cologne in 1910 and established a studio as a portrait photographer there. In 1929 he published Antlitz der Zeit (Face of our time), a collection of 60 portraits constituting a sociological inventory of German society in the 1920s, which the Nazis eventually banned. In 1938–39 Sander took numerous identity photographs for Jews in Cologne; after the war he added 12 of these to his oeuvre under the title The Persecuted. Sander died in 1964, leaving behind a chronicle and sociological inventory of his time in more than 40,000 photos.