Wandering into the Kathleen Ewing Gallery in Washington the other day, I came across Kathleen’s “Sander Wall”, located in her gallery office and consisting of a grid formed by portraits done by the German master, August Sander.

Seeing this striking presentation reminded me once again what a remarkable photographer Sander is.

 

The “Sander Wall’, Kathleen Ewing Gallery, Washington DC,   Mark L. Power

click to enlarge

August Sander lived in Austria and Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic, and in the 20s he bgan a supremely ambitious portrait project. “Man of the Twentieth Century” a monumental, lifelong photographic attempt to document the people of his native Westerwald, near Cologne.

The Sander archive is immense, consisting of over 40,000 negatives among which are the 600 or so photographs of men, women, and children of the Weimar. In other words, although Kathleen’s ‘Sander Wall’ contains many of his most iconic images it is but the tip of the iceberg and you’d be well rewarded to investigate further the work of this master.

I suggest starting with the Wikipedia entry on August Sander and that will lead you to other sources.


Returning to the Ewing ‘Sander Wall’ this is the Sander picture behind the blue lamp on the right:

 

 

 

 

And another famous Sander portrait, “The Bricklayer”

 

 

 


These photographs and the others are both images very much of their time, yet you could say they are timeless as well. These people seem as alive as the day they were photographed but paradoxically they are unable to step out of their time into ours. While Sander’s craft  - large format photographs of carefully posed subjects - speak to a certain period in European history and photography, the humanity evident in Sander’s subjects reach out and speak to the future, too.  We never meet people like these except in Sander’s universe but don’t you wish we could?

 

Anton and Marta, 1925

 

 

 

Here’s another famous Sander, “Three Farmers of their Way to a Dance.” (1913 or 1914) and this image illustrates Sander’s importance as an influence on future generations of artists, including writers, painters and photographers.

For instance, Three Farmers became the subject of author Richard Powers’ first novel “Three Farmers on their way to a dance” in 1985, and from his scrutiny of this image Powers formed a fictional narrative of three European boys and their intertwined lives.

Photographers who have absorbed Sanders into their work are legion. Among the many are Lisette Model, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and maybe most famously, Diane Arbus…

 

 

August Sander, Peasant Girls, 1928

 

Diane Arbus, Indentical Twins, Roselle, NJ, 1966


Or could this Sander photograph been Arbus’ inspiration?

 

Dwarves, 1912

 

Most likely, she was impressed by both images. I was struck by the fact that the “peasant girls” watches showed no time but then of course ( as was pointed out by less credulous observers) they were probably bracelets, not watches. In any event, it is doubtful that the iconic ‘Indentical twins’ could have existed without August Sanders.

Pictures of twins seem to continuously appeal to the photographic imagination; here is the most recent cover of the magazine SHOTS:

 

 

 

                                         Darren Holmes, Ladies of the Sky

 

and in my researches I came across an anonymous photographer who may have been impressed by August Sander. . .

 

Anonymous, ca 1940

 

 

Recently photographer Michael Somoroff had a novel idea: with his series, The Absence of the Subject, he would remove the subjects from some of Sander’s portraits, then see what was left. For instance here is the deconstruction of Sander’s famous portrait of a cook:

 

 

                        August Sander, Pastry Chef 1928                Michael Somoroff, 2007

click to enlarge

 

August Sander, Gypsy

 

Michael Somoroff, 2007

 

 

What is left can only be described as strangely unsettling scenes haunted by invisible presences.

 

           Jon Haddock

 

 

Somoroff’s images reminded me of another exercise in deconstruction (warning: the world of Weimar is fast receding behind us) and that is Jon Haddock’s take on the flood of pornography that characterizes our culture.

Jon Haddock, a midwest photographer, comic book artist, sculptor and photographer, had the clever idea of removing the participants from a pornographic scene, and like Somoroff’s work, the result is a mysterious transformation:  instead of pornography, we’re suddenly in the land of QVS, the home shopping network. In these rooms you can almost hear an oily voiceover extolling the virtues of acquiring a bedroom suite, pronounced suit instead of sweet.

 

Jon Haddock


If that wasn’t enough, Jon Haddock’s imagination led him to take existing porn photographs and turn them into comic book art featuring mice. The  results are riotous:

 

 

Jon Haddock

 

 

Doubtless Jon Haddock, like many of us has wondered what the presence of internet pornography flooding our households says about our culture and doubtless he also wondered why contemporary artists seem so tentative in their attempts to understand this phenomenon. Robert Heineken tried in the 70s and other artists have followed like Thomas Ruff with his blurry appropriations  but their efforts seem timid compared to the vitality of the originals…

 

                                                           Thomas Ruff

 

Other artists seem to adopt the strategy of becoming pornographers themselves, Nobuyoshi Araki, for example, or Helmut Newton and Andres Serrano with his ” A History of Sex”,  all of which themselves become a commentary on pornography . . .

 

Nobuyoshi Araki

 

Now this topic threatens to become its own post so I’ll stop here and keep it for another day. (why do I see my subscriptions suddenly take a leap?)

We’ve come a long way from the three farmers going down a road in 1913 to work where anthropomorphic animals mimic human beings in the throes of sexual abandon, but nonetheless, this journey through the minds of these imaginative artists throws a fitful spotlight on some of the mores of our strange culture . . .