ARTIST ROOMS: August Sander
12 February – 10 July; Dean Gallery, Edinburgh

About 1890, a young slag-heap boy in a German mining village was asked to help a photographer into the countryside with his camera. The boy was curious; the photographer let him have a peek through the viewfinder. The boy was captivated, and soon managed to pester his uncle into buying him a camera, and his father into building him a darkroom next to the barn.

That boy was August Sander, who went on to run a successful photography studio, employing the fashionable Pictorial style of the time: fanciful portraits were composed like paintings, shot in soft focus, and significantly retouched. It wasn’t long, however, before he parted company with Pictorialism. “I hate nothing more than sugary photographs,” he was later to say, “with tricks, poses and effects.”

Sander’s new watchword was “See, observe and think.” In keeping with the nascent New Objectivity, his photographs became sharp, uncontrived, and documentary. People adopted their own poses, and revealed more about themselves than they knew.  “Contrary to customary practice,” the artist said in 1907, “I endeavour to leave in my pictures the characteristic traits that time, situation and life have wrought in a face.”

In 1911, the photographer started his life’s work. People Of The 20th Century was to be an album of over 600 portraits, ordered by social type, all taken in the area around Sander’s native Cologne. Over 160 of these are to fill the top floor of The Dean Gallery from this Saturday, along with vintage landscape prints and intimate photographs from the family’s personal collection.

“It’s a picture of Germany, really”, says Keith Hartley, who is curating the exhibition alongside Gerd Sander, the artist’s grandson.  “That was his vast project,” he continues, “which took up from about the First World War, all the way through to his death”.

Taken as a whole, the project is a fascinating study of country life in turbulent times, and an ambitious anthropological document. Individually, every picture suggests a story worth hearing.

The collection starts with an album of “Archetypes” – country farmers who, for Sander, were the basis for all humanity. Men and women sit, their faces furrowed, staring quietly into the lens as if time has slowed almost to a stop. The images are remarkably sharp, and arrestingly direct.

Hartley connects Sander’s photographs to the German tradition of “crisply delineated portraits”. Many artists, at the start of the 20th century, were “starting to look back to earlier German prototypes; to Dürer, to Cranach; people like that.”

People were often photographed by Sander in stern frontality, against a neutral background: two standard features of The New Objectivity. This documentary approach allowed his subjects to convey their own personalities, whether consciously or not. “He was interested in seeing what photographs could tell you about people”, says Hartley, “Gestures, facial types, the way people stood, all these sorts of things.”

Sander’s second category was “Country Folk”. Names are rarely given; instead the photographs are given titles such as “young peasants”, or “small town man and wife”. While these portraits are intensely specific, Sander wanted them to stand also as universal archetypes. The project was, for the artist, a “physiognomic image of an age”.

It’s impossible to look at these pictures of innocence, dating from 1911 to 1932, without a troubling awareness of what was in store for these young men and women. Later albums, dividing people by class, profession and gender, were to include specific reference to the Second World War.

“Germany was going through a massive revolutionary period in society,” explains Hartley, “and I think Sander felt that he wanted to capture some of this, so he not only showed some of the Nazis in his photographs, but he also showed what he called victims of political persecution.”

Sander’s own son, Erich, was imprisoned in 1934 for his Communist views, and his is one of four portraits of political prisoners to be shown in the exhibition. There are also pictures of “foreign workers”, taken from occupied territories and put to forced labour. “If it had been known that he was photographing people like that,” says Hartley, “he could have come to quite a bit of harm.”

Sander had already been in trouble with the Nazis. In 1936, they had seized the photographic plates for his book Face Of Our Time, and destroyed them. Fortunately, he still had the negatives, and went to great effort to ensure their future safety through bombings and house fires.

The last album in Sander’s project was called The Last People. These were the blind, the crippled, the mentally disabled, and the dead: “The people”, as Hartley puts it, “that potentially the Nazis were to do away with”. The last picture in the exhibition, drawn from this album, is that of Erich’s death mask. Sander’s son died in 1944, refused medical aid in his prison cell.