Tuesday, 1 January 2013

MP/VISUAL RESEARCH - AUGUST SANDER





I move on to research some portraiture of a nation after the social landscape survey.  No doubt August Sander’s work is the starting point...

The straight-ahead portraits depict German citizens, many of them surrounded by accouterments of their labor. In 1936, Nazi officials seized all copies of Sander’s books and ordered that his Face of Our Time photographs be destroyed. This was because the social and cultural range of people he photographed suggested diversity within the German nation, which was a threat to the Nazi doctrine of racial purity. Sander’s studio was destroyed in a World War II bombing raid in 1944.

Of course, photography can not reveal everything or even anything beneath, but it does give us some surface information.

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