Young Girl in Circus Wagon, Du ̈ren, 1932
Bend in the Rhine River near Boppard, c. 1935
Further Reading
Gasser, Manuel.du(special issue dedicated to Sander).
November, 1959.
Halley, Anne. ‘‘August Sander.’’The Massachusetts Review
(Winter 1978).
Naef, Weston, ed.August Sander: Photographs from The J.
Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty
Museum, 2000.
Sander, August.Antlitz der Zeit(1929). Munich: Schirmer/
Mosel, 1976.
Heiting, Manfred, ed, August Sander, 1876–1964. New
York: Taschen, 1999.
Von Hartz, John.August Sander: Aperture Masters of
Photography. New York: Aperture Books, 1997.
Sander, Gunther, ed.August Sander: Citizens of the Twen-
tieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986.
Sander, Gerd.August Sander: In der Photographie gibt es
keine ungekla ̈rten Schatten! Cologne: August Sander
Archives/Stiftung City-Treff Ko ̈ln, 1994.
Von Hartz, John.August Sander. Millertown, N.Y.: Aper-
ture, 1977.SANDWICHED NEGATIVES
Before manipulative capabilities were transformed
by computerization and digitization of the photo-
graphic image, artists used manual approaches to
expand their images beyond a direct rendering of
what lay before the camera. Collage, photomon-
tage, combination printing, and sandwiched nega-
tives were all methods photographers used to
transform the image from a direct rendering of
reality to something that utilized photographic
components to a different end. Sandwiched nega-
tives refers to a darkroom technique in which two
separate negatives are placed on top of one another
in the enlarger’s negative carrier. Light passes
through the negatives simultaneously to render a
positive that includes the details of both negatives.
In particular, the details of one appear through the
light areas of the other. This is difficult with par-
ticularly dense negatives, and some practitioners
underexpose the negatives knowing light will pass
through them more easily when they are combined,
or ‘‘sandwiched.’’ Depending on which way the
images relate best, the negatives can either be
placed emulsion to emulsion or front to back.
In some instances, rather than placing the nega-
tives in direct contact, they may be stacked with a
piece of glass between them in the negative carrier.
In this way, the focus may be adjusted so that one
image is sharp, while the other image is soft and
without detail. This process is not limited to nega-
tives combined within the enlarger and can also be
used to make a combination contact print with
large format negatives that are 45, 810, or
even 1114 inches in size. In this way the nega-
tives are stacked and placed under a piece of glass
to flatten them and hold their position on the light-
sensitive paper. Practitioners may also use this
strategy to combine pairs of color slides for expo-
sure on positive/positive paper.
As photography was struggling to be considered
an artistic medium in the late nineteenth century,
photographers masterminded ingenious ways to
make photographs that either looked like paintings
or shared conceptual ideas with painting. British
photographers Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Henry
Peach Robinson made complicated genre scenes and
detailed allegories by using multiple negatives, multi-
ple exposures, and combination printing. In Robin-
son’s 1869 treatisePictorial Effect in Photography:
Being Hints on Composition and Chiaro-oscuro
for Photographers, to which is Added a Chapter
on Combination Printing, he outlined ways in
which photographers could manipulate their neg-
atives to gain greater control over the image. By
mitigating the mechanical nature of the process,
photography was more likely to be accepted as a
creative form.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the
Berlin Dadaists utilized a variety of methods to
combine disparate pieces of found imagery, mate-
rials, and text. In the late 1920s, interest in the
hand-made quality of collage was supplanted by
photomontage’s seamless images made in the dark-
room on light-sensitive paper. Sandwiching nega-
tives was one of the many complicated darkroomSANDWICHED NEGATIVES