August Sander

After working in the mines for seven years and serving in the military, August Sander studied painting in Dresden between 1901 and 1902. His intention was to enhance his artistic skills, in order to apply them to his interest in photography, which he had developed on numerous trips and while working at many photographic business in Berlin, Magdeburg, Leipzig, Halle and Dresden in 1898 band 1899.

Finally, in 1902 he moved to Linz where he first worked at studio Greif and then in 1904 founded the August Sander studio for artistic photography and painting. In 1909 he returned to Cologne, where he founded his studio in Lindenthal in 1910.

There he began his life's work, people of the 20th century, which occupied him into the fifties. In the thirties he got into trouble with the National Socialists on account of his son's political activities, causing him in those years to devote himself almost exclusively to taking pictures of landscapes in the Rhine River area and in old Cologne. Prior to that, by publishing the mirror of Germany and face of the times, he was able to accomplish at least the initial stage of his idea of  an encyclopedic and systematic picture of the German people.

Finally in 1980 his son Gunther, collaborating with Ulrich Keller, published the combined work under the original title "people of the 20th century". After the destruction of his studio and archive in 1944, Sander moved to Kuchhausen in the Westerwald region, where he continued working under the most primitive conditions. His name almost forgotten in Cologne until L. Fritz Gruber showed his work at photokina in 1951 and arranged for his pictures of Old Cologne to be taken over by the museum of the city of Cologne.

Sander's portrait work constitutes an important contribution to the recognition of photography as an art. Today his systematic approach is viewed as an early example of conceptual art, which was also not with out influence on the development of the creative arts. He is now considered to be Germany's internationally best known photographer of this century.