AugustSander

August Sander was born on 17 November 1876 in Herdorf, near Cologne, the son of a carpenter working in the mining industry. He first learned photography assisting a photographer employed by the mining company, and with financial support from his uncle bought his first equipment and taught himself the craft. He served his military duty from 1897 to 1899 as a photographer's assistant under Georg Jung, then worked in studios in Berlin, Magdeburg, Halle, Leipzig and Dresden. In 1901 he joined the Photographische Kunstanstalt Greif in Linz, Austria, becoming its sole proprietor in 1904, before leaving at the end of 1910, when his son fell ill with polio, to open a new studio in the Lindenthal district of Cologne.

In the early 1920s Sander met regularly with the Cologne Group of Progressive Artists, including Franz W. Seiwert and Heinrich Hoerle, and it was during this period that he formalized the concept for his major project, Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (People of the 20th Century). In November 1927 he introduced roughly 100 portraits from the project at the Kölnischer Kunstverein; the exhibition's reception led to the 1929 publication of his first book, Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time), for which he spent six months organizing the layout of sixty portraits — a preview of the larger project to come.

When the Nazi party came to power in 1933, Antlitz der Zeit was seized in 1936 and its printing plates destroyed. In 1934 Sander's son Erich, a member of the left-wing Socialist Workers' Party, was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison, where he died in 1944, shortly before his release. Around 1942 Sander began moving his most important negatives to the village of Kuchhausen in the Westerwald; his Cologne studio was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1944. He continued to work on People of the 20th Century for the rest of his life, editing and annotating his selections in notes and correspondence.

In 1951 Sander exhibited at Photokina in Cologne, an initiative supported by the publicist L. Fritz Gruber, an old family friend. In 1953 he was visited by Edward Steichen, who selected works for his landmark 1955 exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sander died in Cologne on 20 April 1964. Though his work spans landscape, nature, architecture and street photography, he remains best known for the portraits comprising Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts.

His legacy was carried forward by his son Gunther, who worked alongside him until his death and later published the first curated selection of the magnum opus in 1980 under its original title. Gunther passed the archive to Gerd Sander in 1984, who founded the August Sander Archive in New York before relocating it to Cologne in 1988 and eventually selling the collection to the SK-Stiftung Kultur. Gerd co-edited, with Susanne Lange and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, the seven-volume August Sander: People of the 20th Century, the definitive reference on the artist's work. In the family tradition, August Sander's great-grandson Julian Sander founded the FEROZ Galerie in 2009, later renamed Galerie Julian Sander, which represents the Estate of August Sander and the private collection of the Sander family.