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I never made a person look bad. They do that themselves.
–-August Sander
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I came across a video this morning that I want to share. It is a PBS produced film called What This Photo Doesn’t Show and delves into the backstory and meaning of the photo shown here, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, taken by the German photographer August Sander in 1914.
It’s an a provocative photo, one that provides plenty of material for one to create narratives in their imagination. So, to learn more about the young men and the story behind the photo adds an additional layer of interest.
August Sander (1876-1964) was considered the most important German photographer of the of the early 20th century. Sander was widely recognized for a collection of portfolios of his portraits taken over a couple of decades. Titled People of the 20th Century, it contained hundreds of his photos that documented a wide spectrum of the German people of that era, from the working classes to the more privileged classes to the homeless and forsaken.
He also produced a book in 1929, Face of Our Time, that contained a group of 60 of these portraits. Under the Nazi regime a few years later, this book was banned and the printing plates for it destroyed. He was allowed to continue working as a photographer but kept under the radar. His son, as a Socialist, was sentenced to ten years in a German prison, where he died in 1944, near the end of his sentence.
That same year, 1944, a bombing raid destroyed Sander’s studio, destroying many of his negatives. Two years later, an accidental fire destroyed the remaining archived negatives of his work. It was said there were around 40,000 negatives at that time. Sander basically stopped working as a photographer at that time until his death in 1964.
The August Sander Archive, even with the great loss of the fires, contains about 5000 photos and 11,000 negatives.
If you have about 9 minutes, take a look at this video. I think you’ll find it interesting and informative.
Thank You…very interesting.
Sent from my iPad
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Such an interesting video. It helped to explain the incongruities that seemed so obvious to me when I first looked at the photo, as well as a lot of details about composition that I never would have thought about.
It also reminded me that when I lived in rural Texas, farmers getting dressed for a dance often meant putting on a shirt with pearl snap buttons and donning good boots: a change, but incremental. Good memories, from a good post.