Three portraits by August Sander are discussed here: Pastry Cook, gelatin silver print, 1928; Secretary at a Radio Station, Cologne, gelatin silver print, c. 1931; and Disabled Man, gelatin silver print, 1926.
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Dr. Juliana Kreinik: [0:04] This portrait that we’re looking at is by August Sander, German photographer. [This] portrait is titled, “Secretary at a Radio Station, Cologne,” and it’s from about 1931.
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:18] Let me see if I can remember this, because it’s been a long time. Sander was trying to create these photographic, perfect representations of types of people or types of occupations, is that right?
Dr. Kreinik: [0:30] Exactly.
Dr. Zucker: [0:31] Almost these sort of platonic ideals.
Dr. Kreinik: [0:33] I don’t know if they’re platonic. I think, you could refer to them as ur-forms or original forms.
[0:38] I think, he’s interested in looking at people in Germany as of particular occupational or professional classes, so they’re types. There are lot of different things that can be drawn from this.
Dr. Zucker: [0:53] So it’s not a physiological representation?
Dr. Kreinik: [0:55] Well, it’s related to physiognomy and who people are in terms of what they do.
Dr. Beth Harris: [1:00] Is this related at all to the physiologies that the French did in the mid- and 19th century?
Dr. Kreinik: [1:07] Yes. Sander did not have strong theories about one type of person looking or necessarily being better, more pure, than another. That really wasn’t his project. He was trained and worked as a portrait photographer in the early 20th century.
[1:23] This portrait is 1931, so for a number of years, he was doing straight portrait photographs, being paid for them in his studio. Then he becomes more interested in a kind of clinical gaze…
Dr. Harris: [1:36] Like saying that a person’s occupation actually forms their physiognomy in a way?
Dr. Kreinik: [1:42] In a way, yes. If you look at somebody’s hands, a worker, a farmer, for example, would have hands that look much different from an accountant’s hands.
Dr. Zucker: [1:53] Perhaps the way that they hold themselves, the kind of drastic…
[1:56] [crosstalk]
Dr. Harris: [1:56] …carry themselves.
Dr. Kreinik: [1:56] Absolutely.
Dr. Zucker: [1:57] So it’s the entire representation of the person.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:00] Right. He’s trying to get a complete picture and look at these connections, like how do we hold ourselves, and how do we present ourselves? It is about public persona because it’s profession.
Dr. Zucker: [2:12] Can I ask a technical question?
Dr. Harris: [2:14] What year is this one?
Dr. Kreinik: [2:14] This is ’31.
Dr. Zucker: [2:15] This is his type of secretary at a radio station. Would he have photographed a whole series of secretaries and then looked for one that was most ideal in some way?
Dr. Kreinik: [2:25] He did a series of women, and so there are different types of women that are…
Dr. Harris: [2:30] Like what?
Dr. Kreinik: [2:31] Farming women, women that are artists. There are professional women, intellectual women. This is probably…
Dr. Harris: [2:37] Lower-middle class.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:39] Lower-middle class or sort of a new salaried women.
[2:44] [crosstalk]
Dr. Zucker: [2:44] That new, threatening…the New Woman.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:45] It’s exactly, I mean she is the New Woman and she has all the trappings of that archetype.
Dr. Harris: [2:51] Did he do a series of men? Because there’s a kind of long history in photography, going back to Mundy, of men photographing women and looking at different types of women and especially fetishizing working-class women.
Dr. Zucker: [3:09] Actually, it goes before photography. Think back to Degas. Well, that’s not before photography, but I mean, just this whole notion of the scintillating quality of…
Dr. Harris: [3:19] Right, the working woman.
Dr. Zucker: [3:20] Right, yes.
Dr. Kreinik: [3:21] He had, I think, a wider gaze than that. He’s looking across professions, so he has a couple of books and exhibitions that come out in the ’20s and ’30s. The one that was published in 1929 was called “Faces of the Time.” That was a collection of 60 photographs and it was intended to be…
Dr. Harris: [3:43] Is it men and women?
Dr. Kreinik: [3:43] It is men and women, yes. It’s faces of our time in general and it organizes people by class or by occupation. He starts off with farmers. He began to take photographs of all these farmers in the Westerwald region in Germany. That’s kind of weird, he came up with all these different kinds of farmers; young farmers and old farmers, big huge families of farmers, farmers that are rich, and farmers that are poor.
[4:09] He’s looking at it really as a kind of scientific project. It’s a sociological, anthropological study of all these and he feels like, especially in the ’20s, to make sense of the changing German culture. To make sense of all these new, different types of people that are appearing, one way to kind of make sense of it all is to try to organize them.
Dr. Zucker: [4:29] It’s almost kind of a documentation.
Dr. Harris: [4:30] Right, categorize it.
Dr. Kreinik: [4:31] It’s a huge project of documentation. It’s very German.
Dr. Zucker: [4:34] In a curious way, it reminds me of the Bechers later.
Dr. Kreinik: [4:36] Yes, well, the Bechers come out of that.
Dr. Harris: [4:39] In what way does it remind you of the Bechers?
Dr. Zucker: [4:40] Just this notion of really trying to document and understand through a kind of almost encyclopedic…
Dr. Kreinik: [4:45] It’s exactly coming from this exact kind of imagery. The Bechers are looking at Sander’s project and other German photographers of this period. That idea that you’re constantly looking very closely, clinically at…dispassionately.
Dr. Harris: [5:04] That so reminds me of 19th-century positivist tradition of scientific categorizing, species, putting things in category…
Dr. Kreinik: [5:16] That comes out in how he organizes everything. He’s not going about this as a…
Dr. Harris: [5:22] It’s not moralizing in any way.
Dr. Kreinik: [5:23] No, he’s not specifically moralizing.
Dr. Harris: [5:24] Which makes this project more modern, because that is not there.
Dr. Zucker: [5:28] It’s also, I mean it may be…
Dr. Kreinik: [5:30] Also artistic.
Dr. Zucker: [5:30] That’s true, and there may be a thin veil of it. Nevertheless, he’s hanging on to a neutrality.
Dr. Harris: [5:34] Well, let’s look at some of the other ones.
Dr. Kreinik: [5:37] There’s this pastry chef. This is a little bit more telling about the idea that it’s a profession. That he’s of a specific profession, because you see him with the tools of his trade.
[5:49] The image we looked at before, that — the New Woman has tools of her trade, but they’re a little bit less obvious. He has his outfit on, he has his pastry chef white jacket.
Dr. Harris: [5:58] Are they often shot in this way, straight on?
Dr. Kreinik: [6:01] Yes, mostly full portraits or three-quarter lengths.
Dr. Zucker: [6:04] At least these two are both somewhat confrontational.
Dr. Kreinik: [6:07] Subjects generally look directly at the camera. They have that dialogue with the photographer. There’s some pride. They’re presenting their public selves. It’s hard to read.
Dr. Harris: [6:22] There’s a kind of mask, a professional mask in a way.
Dr. Kreinik: [6:24] It’s a professional mask that you take up. He’s almost paused in the middle of something. But it also looks posed.
[6:31] Sander’s definitely posing him. He’s got light set up in a certain way. It’s really contrasty. It brings out the white of his jacket. Then there’s silver. There’s that gleam of the bowl.
Dr. Harris: [6:44] It’s also so carefully composed. These lines of bins or whatever they are that come and meet toward his head. It’s drawing our attention to his face.
[6:54] It’s that diagonal line of his hand going toward the corner with the spoon.
Dr. Kreinik: [7:00] And his body takes up a significant amount of space within the image.
Dr. Zucker: [7:04] It’s a beautifully composed image.
Dr. Kreinik: [7:06] It is, and his portraits are even more striking because of that.
Dr. Harris: [7:09] Here’s another one. What’s this one called?
Dr. Kreinik: [7:11] This is called “Disabled Man.”
Dr. Zucker: [7:13] This is only a few years after the end of the First World War, and disability was incredibly public, right?
Dr. Kreinik: [7:20] It was. This, I always think, is very striking and an ironic portrait.
Dr. Harris: [7:26] He stays in front of the stairs.
Dr. Kreinik: [7:29] Not really sure if he has legs or what part of his legs are left. He doesn’t have prosthetics. Likely he has this half-wheelchair cart thing. He gazes out, perhaps a little…
Dr. Harris: [7:42] Reproachfully.
Dr. Kreinik: [7:42] Reproachfully at the photographer.
Dr. Harris: [7:46] It’s also, again, just a lovely composition with the diagonal line of the stairs and the…
Dr. Kreinik: [7:51] The perspective is really striking. It really sort of brings your attention. You can’t help but look at the stairs and then look back at the figure.
Dr. Zucker: [7:59] There’s this interesting sort of mix between the tragic and the beautiful. It makes an enormously sort of powerful combination. There’s an attempt by the subject to retrieve a degree of dignity — in his posture, in his suit coat.
Dr. Kreinik: [8:13] Yeah, he’s upright. He’s staring straight out at the photographer as well and I like that confrontational look. He’s meeting our gaze and…I feel like I’m looking right at him when I look at the image.
Dr. Harris: [8:28] He’s very present, very alive.
Dr. Zucker: [8:30] And at his level, the photographer was down. It’s not looking, it appears…
Dr. Harris: [8:33] It’s not looking down at him.
Dr. Zucker: [8:33] It’s not looking down at him even though he’s at a lower level. We’ve assumed a kind of crouch so that we’re looking across. At least that’s what the orthogonal seem to suggest.
Dr. Kreinik: [8:43] I think his arms are up. He’s not slouched. There are other disabled war veterans who had these little carts that were just basically like skateboards. They would push themselves on the ground. You can see a lot of those in paintings of the early 1920s.
Dr. Zucker: [9:01] This is somebody who the public might have tried to avert their gaze from.
Dr. Harris: [9:06] Well, that’s the thing.
Dr. Kreinik: [9:06] Probably, yes.
Dr. Zucker: [9:07] To put this person sort of front and center in a photograph as a subject of our gaze is pretty powerful.
Dr. Harris: [9:13] I think knowing what we know is going to happen a few years from this, that people who are disabled in all sorts of ways are — the Nazis try to destroy that image of the imperfect body.
Dr. Kreinik: [9:29] I think it’s that the sense of this is in the public. What do they do with this kind of person? You sort of push them away, push them off to the side. I’m not trying to make Sander out as some sort of…
Dr. Zucker: [9:41] It’s not the first image.
Dr. Kreinik: [9:42] it’s not the first image. It’s not with sort of more heroicized farmers. He’s not with the intellectual types. Sander does turn his camera on all different people in society…
Dr. Zucker: [9:53] So this is part of that encyclopedic quality.
Dr. Kreinik: [9:55] It is encyclopedic, but he’s probably in a similar section as the unemployed. He’s not sort of held up.
Dr. Harris: [10:02] What’s interesting to me, though, is that, if this image had been filled more with pathos, if it had been more pitying, more emotional in some way, Sander might not be part of the modernist canon. It’s this detached gaze that’s so much of a part of what modernism is. As soon as sentiment enters into it, or manipulation in some way, it blurs that line.
Dr. Zucker: [10:33] That’s right, because the narrative is inserted then in a very direct way, and the modernist aesthetic rejects this.
Dr. Harris: [10:40] Which is a weird thing.
Dr. Zucker: [10:41] What’s interesting is that there is a narrative here. The wounded are a representation of Germany’s failure during the First World War, their loss.
Dr. Kreinik: [10:50] Or at least that’s how we’re reading it. That’s how I always look at it, as a disabled man from…
Dr. Harris: [10:59] The war.
Dr. Kreinik: [11:00] …the war. Now, he could be disabled from something else entirely.
Dr. Zucker: [11:03] Of course.
[11:04] [crosstalk]
Dr. Kreinik: [11:05] There were so many images, that it just becomes symbolic of that. One of the things that Sander did that was great was use this clinical, scientific gaze, where he wanted to organize all these images, and it brings out this tension between science and art, that I think is really, really important in photography.
[11:28] It’s that tension that makes the images so wonderful, and so striking, that you look at this stark image that doesn’t seem coated with sentiment, yet also has conventions of beauty, and the treatments…
Dr. Harris: [11:46] Photography itself is scientific in some way.
Dr. Kreinik: [11:49] Right, and there’s still the mechanical…
Dr. Harris: [11:51] The mechanical.
Dr. Kreinik: [11:52] …mechanical. One of the things that Sander was able to do, and one of the reasons why he started creating these images, is that he accidentally printed on a different kind of paper in about 1920. It really does make a difference, the kind of paper that you print on when you create a photograph. Now we have digital images, and we print on…
Dr. Harris: [12:16] Anything.
Dr. Kreinik: [12:16] …anything, really. This image versus a carbon print, versus gum bichromate print, versus any kind of other earlier photograph, those are much more fuzzy, they’re blurry. It has a sense of the artistic, or the pictorial. Once you start printing on paper that has more neutral tones, or even cold tones, it takes on that scientific…
Dr. Harris: [12:40] Documentary.
Dr. Kreinik: [12:41] …documentary gaze, so that you’re looking at things, and they seem more objective. They take up that guise, and whether or not they are or not, we end up reading them…
Dr. Harris: [12:49] In that way.
Dr. Kreinik: [12:50] …in that way.
Dr. Zucker: [12:50] They also for photography might have functioned in some way…I guess this is a question. Did they function in some way as a way of divorcing photography from painting? In a sense, giving photography a kind of autonomy, an aesthetic autonomy, maybe allied with science, that finally brought it away from those pictorial traditions in which it had been embedded.
Dr. Kreinik: [13:11] That was really exciting for artists, photographers in the ’20s. The idea of the new, that photography — that was one of the reasons it was so appealing, is that it’s a technology of modernity. It’s of the new, it’s of science, it has nothing to do with…or so they wanted to think, of painting, and of the old, and of traditions mired in the past.
Dr. Harris: [13:32] You could create from it something entirely new and of the modern era.
Dr. Zucker: [13:37] Except that all the vocabulary that we’ve been using is embedded in the history of art, and the history of painting.
Dr. Harris: [13:42] Because what makes an image successful is just what makes an image successful in a way, whether what we’re looking at.
Dr. Zucker: [13:49] It’s true, although embedded in its own technological and historical moment. What a terrific image.
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