August Sander's Enormous Attempt to Capture a Lost World

August Sander created a large series of portraits intended as a visual catalogue of types and professions in Germany from about 1910 to around 1950. The portraits include people across many roles and identities, arranged in tall, orderly grids. Alongside human subjects, animals appear, including horses, cows, and a few dogs. Several dogs are shown with blurred heads, suggesting they moved during long exposures made with a tripod-mounted camera. The dogs look contemporary because they do not wear antiquated clothing, do not have period mustaches, and do not show the weathered, class-linked appearance applied to human subjects. Their presence places them outside the sign system used to sort people by class.

"August Sander's masterpiece—some six hundred portraits of everyone from a pastry chef to a President, from Jews and Roma to Nazis and demagogues, from engineers and artists to nervous young farmers on their wedding day—bears the irresistibly ambitious title "People of the 20th Century." At the Yale University Art Gallery, which is showing the complete series in the photographer's largest exhibition yet, the images are hung in tall, orderly grids, like a periodic table of the human elements."

"Although nearly all of Sander's subjects look as if they belong to another age, the dogs don't. In several pictures their heads are blurred, these boys not quite good enough to hold still for the longish exposure of Sander's tripod-mounted camera. The canines—a Doberman, a miniature Doberman, some German shepherds and collie-looking creatures, a number of hunting dogs of indiscriminate extraction, and one long-haired dachshund trying hard to pretend he's not soaking wet—are restlessly contemporary."

"The reason is almost laughably simple: they don't wear antiquated clothes, they don't have period mustaches, and their faces and limbs are not variably weathered according to their station, which, when Sander was working, was still largely measured by your closeness to the earth. In other words, the dogs look out from beyond the system of signs we use to sort people—from beyond class, the real subject of Sander's pictures."

"From about 1910 to around 1950, Sander sought to make nothing less than a visual catalogue of all the types and professions in Germany. He"

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