Therefore, let me in honesty speak the truth about our epoch and people.
In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.
No language on earth speaks as comprehensively as photography, always providing that we follow the chemical and optic and physical path to demonstrable truth, and understand physiognomy.
Nothing is more abhorrent to me than sugary-sweet photography full of pretense, poses, and gimmickry. For this reason, I have allowed myself to tell the truth about our times and people in a sincere manner.
I hate nothing more than sugary photographs with tricks, poses and effects. So allow me to be honest ?and tell the truth about our age and its people.
Nothing seemed to me more appropriate than to project an image of our time with absolute fidelity to nature by means of photography.
Pure photography allows us to create portraits which render their subjects with absolute truth, truth both physical and psychological. That is the principal which provided my starting point, once I had said to myself that if we can create portraits of subjects that are true, we thereby in effect create a mirror of the times in which those subjects live.
By sight and observation and thought, with the help of the camera, and the addition of the date of the year, we can hold fast the history of the world.
Photography has no dark sides!
... mortification is basic to the act of photographing. The person is mobile, ... then I freeze one moment in his movement, a mere five-hundredth of a second of that person's life-time. That's a very meager or small extract from a life.
I never made a person look bad. They do that themselves.
Nothing is more hateful to me than photography coated with gimmicks, poses and false effects. Therefore let me speak the truth in all honesty about our age and the people of our age
Author details
August Sander: Biography and Life Work
August Sander was a notable Photographer. The story of August Sander began on 17 November 1876 in Herdorf, Kingdom of Prussia. The legacy of August Sander continues today, following their passing on 20 April 1964 in Cologne, West Germany.
August Sander (17 November 1876 – 20 April 1964) was a German portrait and documentary photographer. His first book Face of our Time (German: Antlitz der Zeit ) was published in 1929. Sander has been described as "the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century". Sander's work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography , but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series People of the 20th Century . In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic .
Legacy and Personal Influence
Personally, August Sander was married to Anna Seitenmacher.
Philosophical Views and Reflections
Around 1942, during World War II , he left Cologne and moved to the small village of Kuchhausen, in the Westerwald region; this allowed him to save the most important part of his body of work. His Cologne studio was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid , but tens of thousands of negatives, which he had left behind in a basement near his former apartment in the city, survived the war. 25 000 to 30 000 negatives in this basement were then destroyed in a 1946 fire. That same year, Sander began his postwar photographic documentation of the city. He also tried to record the mass rape of German women by Red Army soldiers in the Soviet occupation zone .
In 2022, Julian Sander made available non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of the entire 10 700 archive of Sander negatives on NFT platform Open Sea . Buying a Sander NFT was free apart from initial upload fees. However for all resale transactions thereon, via a smart contract Julian Sander would receive 7.5% of the resale cost and photographer Alejandro Cartagena 's Fellowship Trust would receive 2.5%. All NFTs in the collection were claimed and, within a few weeks, over 400 ETH was traded in secondary sales on Open Sea. Soon and without warning, the archive was delisted from Open Sea because SK Stiftung Kultur claimed that as it owns the copyright to Sander's work until 2034, the NFT collection is thus in violation of copyright law. Julian Sander argues that the doctrine of fair use allows him to publish the images in such commercial settings.
