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Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 6
Lesson 1: Prints and photographySander, Portraits
Portraits by August Sander discussed: Pastry Cook, gelatin silver print, 1928 Secretary at a Radio Station, Cologne, gelatin silver print, c. 1931 Disabled Man, gelatin silver print, 1926 Speakers: Dr. Juliana Kreinik, Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
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- @11:30The photograph of "Disabled Man". Was Sander trying to convey a message by posing this wounded soldier in a wheel chair in front of a stair case? What is this message?(8 votes)
- The Germans have a saying:
Es gibt keinen Fahrstuhl zum Glück, man muss die Treppe nehmen. This is usually translated: there is no elevator to luck, one must walk the steps. However, the word fahrstuhl also occurs in Krankenfahrstuhl, which means wheelchair...
To me, knowing that this picture is German, and being aware of the German saying, I believe it could be a play on words in effect saying: "You cannot have luck when your are in a wheelchair." Which is far more depressing than "don't give up".(13 votes)
- I don't know if it is how I am reading the shadows but the secretary in the photograph at the beginning of this piece almost seems to have an Adam's apple which would make for a rather odd example of the new woman. Is this deliberate on the part of the artist? If so, what is the artist saying?(5 votes)
- I agree, -- The woman in the photo does not in any sense seem like a typical secretary -- or even a "typical" woman (if there is such a thing). Her features seem more typical of possibly being trans-sexual or trans-gender, which leads me to seeing Sander's portraits differently than perhaps the narrators do. I think Sanders finds the uniqueness in the individuals he photographs, and though he poses them for optimum composition, lighting, etc., in their everyday settings, they become much more than their titles: She is not just a secretary, he is not just a baker, he is not just a victim of a war. Each person is an individual with a story, a history, and a uniqueness. The photos make you want to know their story.(7 votes)
Video transcript
(music) ("In The Sky With
Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy) Juliana: This portrait
that we're looking at is by August Sander, German photographer. This portrait is titled "Secretary at a Radio Station, Cologne" and it's from about 1931. Steven: Let's see if I can remember this because it's been a long time. Sander was trying to
create these photographic perfect representations of types of people or types of occupations, is that right? Juliana: Exactly. Steven: Almost these
sort of platonic ideals. Juliana: I don't know if they're platonic. I think you could refer to them as [earth] forms or original forms. I think he's just interested in looking at people in Germany as a
particular occupational or professional class so they're types ... (break in audio) There are a lot of different things that can be drawn from this. Steven: So it's not a
physiological representation? Juliana: It's related to physiognomy and who people are in terms of what they do. Steven: Okay. Beth: Is this related at all
to the physiologies that ... Juliana: Yeah. Beth: ... The French did
in the mid 19th century? Juliana: Yes. Sander did not
have strong theories about one type of person looking
or necessarily being better and more purer than another. That really wasn't his project. He was trained and worked as a portrait photographer in
the early 20th century. This portrait is 1931,
so for a number of years, he was doing straight
portrait photographs, being paid for them in his studio. Then he becomes more interested in a kind of clinical gaze. Beth: So saying that a person's occupation actually forms their physiognomy in a way? Juliana: In a way, yes. If
you look at somebody's hands, a worker, a farmer for example, would have hands that
look much different from an accountant's hands. Steven: And perhaps the way
that they hold themselves. (crosstalk) Steven: So it's the entire sort of representation of the person. Juliana: Right. He's
trying to get a complete picture and sort of look
at these connections like how do we hold ourselves and how do we present ourselves? It is about public persona
because it's profession. Steven: Can I ask a technical question? Juliana: This is '31. Steven: This is his type of
secretary at a radio station. Would he have photographed
a whole series of secretaries and then
looked for one that was most ideal in some way? Juliana: He did a series
of women, so there were different types of women
like farming women, women that are artists,
they're professional women, intellectual women, this is probably a lower middle class or
sort of new salaried woman. (crosstalk) Steven: That new threatening ... Juliana: It's exactly. Steven: ... A new woman. Juliana: She is the new woman and she has all the trappings of that art type. Beth: Did he do a series of men? Because there's a long
history in photography going back to Mundy of men photographing women and looking at
different types of women, especially shadowsizing
working class women. Steven: Actually it
goes before photography. (crosstalk) Steven: [unintelligible] Dega. Think back to, that's
not before photography, but just this whole notion of the sintillating quality of ... Beth: Right, the working woman. Juliana: He has a wider gaze than that. He's looking across profession, so he has a couple of books and exhibitions that come out in the '20s and '30s. The one that was published
in 1929 was called "Spaces of the Time" and that was
a collection of 60 photographs. It was intended to be - Beth: Is it men and women? Juliana: It's men and women, yes. It's faces of our time in general and it organizes people by
class or by occupation. He starts off with farmers. He began to take photographs
of all these farmers in the Westerwald region in Germany. That's where he came up
with all these different kinds of farmers; young
farmers and old farmers, big huge families of farmers,
farmers that are rich, farmers that are poor. He's looking at it really as
a kind of scientific project. It's a sociological, anthropological study of all these and he feels
like, especially in the '20s, to make sense of the
changing German culture, and to make sense of
all these new, different types of people that are appearing. One way to make sense of it all is sort of organize them or categorize them. Steven: It's almost
kind of a documentation. Juliana: It's a huge
project of documentation. It's very German. Steven: In a curious way, it reminds me of the [Bechers] later. Juliana: Well, the
[Bechers] come out of that. Beth: In what way does it
remind you of the [Bechers]? Steven: Just this notion of
really trying to document and understand through
an almost encyclopedic - Juliana: It's coming from
this exact kind of imagery. The [Bechers] are looking
at Sander's project and other German
photographers of this period. That idea that you're
constantly looking very closely, clinically, at - [unintelligible] Beth: That so reminds me of a 19th century positivist tradition of
scientific categorizing, species and putting things in categories. Juliana: That comes out in
how he organizes everything, but he's not going about
this as immoralizing - Beth: He's not specifically moralizing. It just makes this project more modern. Steven: There's also, it may be - Juliana: And also artistic. Steven: That's true,
and there may be a thin veil of it, but nevertheless, he's hanging onto neutrality. Juliana: Let's look at
some of the other ones. There's a pastry chef and
this is maybe a little bit more telling about the idea
that it's a profession, that he's of a specific
profession, because you see him with the tools of his trade. The image we looked at before, the new woman has tools of her trade, but they're a little bit less obvious. He has his outfit on, he has
his pastry chef white jacket. Beth: Are they often shot
in this way, straight on? Juliana: Yes, mostly full
portraits or 3/4 length. Steven: At least these two are
both somewhat confrontational. Juliana: Subjects generally
look directly at the camera and they have that dialog
with the photographer. It's often very, like
there's some sort of pride. They're sort of presenting
their public selves. It's hard to read. Beth: There's a kind of professional mask. Juliana: It is. It's a professional
mask that you sort of take up. He's almost sort of
paused in the middle of something that it also looks posed. Sander is definitely posing him. He's got light set up in a certain way that's really contrasty, it brings out the white of his jacket and
then there's sort of silver and there's sort
of the gleam of the bowl. Beth: And it's also so carefully composed; these lines of bins or
whatever they are that sort of come and meet toward his head. It's drawing our attention to his face. It's that diagonal line of his hand going toward the corner with the spoon. Juliana: And his body
takes up a significant amount of space within the image. Steven: It's really a
beautifully composed image. Juliana: It is. His
portraits are even more striking because of that. Here's another one. Beth: What's this one called? Juliana: This is called "Disabled Man." Steven: So this is really
only a few years after the end of the first world war. Disability was incredibly public, right? Juliana: It was. This
I always think is very striking and an ironic portrait. Juliana: Yeah, he's sitting
in front of the stairs. He's not really sure if
he has legs or what part of his legs are left, so he
doesn't have prosthetics. Likely he has this half
wheelchair or cart thing. He sort of gazes out, perhaps
a little reproachfully at the photographer. Beth: But it's also a
lovely composition with the diagonal line of the stairs and the - Juliana: The perspective
is really striking. It really brings your attention ... You can't help but look at the stairs and then look back at figure who's ... Steven: And there's really
this interesting mix between the tragic and the beautiful. It really makes it an
enormously powerful combination. There's an attempt by
the subject to retrieve a degree of dignity in his
posture, in his suit coat. Juliana: Yeah, he's
upright and he's staring straight out at the photographer as well. I like that kind of confrontational look. He's meeting our gaze and I feel like I'm looking right at him
when I look at the image. Steven: And he's level. Steven: The photographer
was down and it appears - Beth: Looking down at him, right. Steven: It's not looking down at him, even though he's at a
lower level, we've assumed a kind of crouch so that
we're looking across, at least that's what the
orthogonal seems to suggest. Juliana: His arms are
up, he's not slouched. There are other disabled
war veterans that these little carts that were just
vaguely like skateboards and they would push
themselves on the ground. You can see a lot of those in
paintings of the early 1920s. Steven: This is somebody
that the public might have tried to avert their gaze from. Juliana: That's the problem, but yes. Steven: And to put this
person front and center in a photograph as a subject of our gaze, is a pretty powerful ... Juliana: And I think
knowing what we know is going to happen a few years from this, that people who are disabled
in all sorts of ways, the Nazis tried to destroy that
image of the imperfect body. I think it's the sense
that this is in the public. What do they do with this kind of person? You sort of push them away,
push them off to the side. I'm not trying to make Sander
out as some sort of ... Steven: It's not the first image. Juliana: It's not the first image, it's not a more heroic as far as farmers, he's not with the intellectual types. Sanders does turn his
camera on all different - (crosstalk) Juliana: It is encyclopedic,
but he's probably in a similar section of the unemployed. He's not held up. Beth: What's interesting to me is that if this image had been
filled more with pathos, if it had been more pitying,
more emotional in some way, Sander might not be part
of the Modernist cannon. Juliana: Right. Beth: It's this kind
of detached gaze that's so much of a part of what Modernism is and as soon as sentiment enters into it, or manipulation in some way, it blurs that line in saying - Steven: The narrative is inserted then in a very direct way and the
Modernist aesthetic rejects this. Beth: Right. Steven: What's interesting
is that there really is a narrative here. This man is, and the wounded, are really a representation of Germany's failure during the first world war, their loss. Juliana: Right, or at least
that's how we're viewing it. I always look at it as a
disabled man from the war. He could be disabled from
something else entirely, but there's so many images that it just sort of becomes symbolic of that. I think one of the things that Sander did that was great was used that clinical, scientific gaze where
he wanted to organize all these images and it brings out the tension between science and art that I think is really, really
important in photography. It's that tension that makes
the images so wonderful and so striking that
you really look at this stark image that doesn't
seem coated with sentiment, yet also has this
convention of beauty and - (crosstalk) Beth: Photography itself
is scientific in some way. Juliana: Right. There's
still sort of a mechnical ... I think one of the things
that Sander was able to do, and one of the reasons why he started creating these images,
is that he accidentally printed on a different kind
of paper in about 1920. It really does make a difference. The kind of paper that you print on when you create a photograph,
now we have digital images and we print on anything, really. This kind of image versus a carbon print versus [unintelligible] print, any other kind of earlier photograph, those are much more fuzzy, they're blurry. This has a sense of the
artistic with a pictorial. Once you start printing on paper that has more neutral tones or even cold tones, it takes on that kind of
scientific, documentary gaze so that you're looking at things and they seem more objective
and they take up that guise. Whether or not they are, we end up reading them in that way. Steven: They also, for
photography, might have functioned in some way, I
guess this is a question, did they function in some way as a way of divorcing photography from painting, and in a sense giving photography a kind of autonomy, an aesthetic autonomy, maybe alive with science
that really finally brought it away from
those pictorial traditions in which it had been embedded? Juliana: That was I
think, really exciting for artists, photographers in the '20s, the idea of the new photography. That was one of the reasons
it was so appealing, is that the technology
of [unintelligible], of the new with the science,
has nothing to do with, or so they wanted to
think, of painting and of the old and of tradition
admired in the past. Beth: You could really create
from it something entirely - (crosstalk) Steven: Except that all
of the vocabulary that we've been using is
embedded in the history of art and in the history of painting. Beth: What makes an
image successful is just what makes an image successful in way, is what we're looking at. Steven: It's true,
although embedded in its own technological and historical moment. What a terrific image. (music) ("In The Sky With
Diamonds" by Scalding Lucy)