August Sander

During a recent trip to Scotland, we visited Edinburgh's Dean Gallery. The current special exhibition is by August Sander, a German photographer whose body of work spans from 1910 to the mid 1940s.

Sander's life work was an extensive projected entitled 'People of the Twentieth Century'; a ‘portrait’ of the society in which he lived consisting of photographs of people across the social strata of Weimar Germany. He appears to have worked in a extremely methodical way, shots being grouped into specific job or role categories: farmers, workmen, artists, industrialists, Nazis, students, the unemployed, political prisoners (including Sander’s son), soldiers, circus performers and persecuted people. Even the dead are included, as ‘Matter’.

I enjoyed the range of portraits in the exhibition and the comprehensive view they give not only of society at the time, but also the clothing and hairstyles of the people.