sought further apprenticeships and studied painting
at the Academy of Art in Dresden, both considered
prerequisites for a successful portrait photographer
at the time. In 1901, he found a position as the
director of a portrait studio in Linz, Austria. A
year later, he married Anna Seitenmacher.
In Linz Sander had a traditional portrait prac-
tice. He employed all the popular trappings of the
pictorialist studio. His early approach to portrai-
ture involved trying to make photographs appear as
salon-style paintings, replete with architectural
props, painted backdrops, special lighting, and
ample retouching. It was a successful combination
in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the
Sanders lived well in Linz for many years. In 1909,
the family decided to abandon the city to avoid
further exposure to the polio epidemic then rav-
aging the city—his eldest son, Erich, had already
been stricken. They moved to Cologne, where San-
der had an offer to join a large portrait business.
Within a year, though, he had gone out on his own,
establishing a new studio in nearby Lindenthal.
At his new studio, he attempted to try a complete
change in style for his portraits. He was no longer
satisfied with the artificiality of his earlier work. In
a 1910 advertising brochure, he described his new
style as ‘‘simple, natural portraits that show the
subjects in an environment corresponding to their
own individuality.’’ He intended to create a new
business by procuring the equipment necessary to
create studio-quality portraits in the sitter’s home.
In an attempt to bolster this business, in 1910 he
began riding through the towns surrounding
Cologne seeking out potential clients. He would
often make trips on Sundays in the hope of catch-
ing people on their way to or from church and
hence already dressed nicely enough for a portrait.
By World War I, Sander had built a solid por-
trait business, including once again a lively trade in
urban studio portraits. Before the war, he tended to
use the ‘‘artistic’’ style for urban portraits and the
more ‘‘natural’’ approach for his rural clients. Dur-
ing his service in the war—Sander was still in the
reserves—he decided that he was unsatisfied with
this split approach. Afterwards, sometime in 1920,
he began experimenting with the use of glossy
paper for all of his prints. He normally used the
labor-intensive gum printing technique for his por-
traits, regardless of sitter or pose. The glossy paper
was typically saved for architectural and industrial
work. With his new technique, his portraits became
documents, and the subjects lost their individuality
as well as their names to become types. Though he
continued his portrait business, his sitters’ images
often ended up as part of Sander’s epic new project.
Sander had long been interested in ideas with
considerable currency in the late nineteenth cen-
tury and early years of the twentieth century that
claimed moral character was evident in facial struc-
ture and habitual expressions. He also brought to
his photographic practice the notion that through
straightforward, thus ‘‘truthful’’ representation of
nature, universal knowledge could be accessed.
Thus, Sander began reorganizing his portrait ar-
chive. The photographs were no longer filed accord-
ing to the names of the individuals, but rather by the
type they would come to represent in a book he was
planning. He imagined a large-scale, encyclopedic
publication of his portraits titledMenschen des 20.
Jahrhunderts (People of the Twentieth Century).
Though the completed work was never published,
the portion of it that was released asAntlitz der Zeit
proved an ample demonstration of his ideas. He said
he divided the work into ‘‘seven groups correspond-
ing to the existing social order.’’ These groups
reflected a social bell curve of Sander’s own percep-
tion. It began on one side with farmers and, as he put
it, ‘‘proceed[ed] from the earthbound man to the
highest peak of civilization, and downward accord-
ing to the most subtle classification to the idiot.’’ The
Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, The Woman, Classes
and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last
People were his seven groupings. Consisting of 45
portfolios, each with 12 photographs, the finished
project would have been immense.
The use of the book as an organizing principle was
extremely important for Sander, and its use remains
one of his enduring contributions to the period. He
noted that ‘‘a successful photo is only a preliminary
step toward the intelligent use of photography...
Photography is like a mosaic that becomes a synth-
esis only when it is presented en masse.’’ Sander
subjugated the individual image’s significance under
that of its role in his grander scheme. Sander was
always eager to control the context in which his
photographs were viewed in order to more clearly
articulate a point of view, but he despised the idea of
manipulating the images themselves.
By the late 1920s, Sander advocated for a strictly
straight approach to photography. In a 1931 radio
broadcast, he announced:
The essence of all photography is of a documentary na-
ture...in documentary photography, the meaning of what
is being represented is more important than the fulfilling
of aesthetic rules of external form and composition.
In this statement, Sander knowingly set his
enterprise apart from the expressionist tradition in
German art and associated himself with the grow-
ing number of adherents, such as Albert Renger-SANDER, AUGUST