Seeing It For Real
To Tate Liverpool for the August Sander exhibition, Portraying A Nation. Sander set out to do just that- to portray an entire nation – through an exhaustive photographic survey which placed the individual firmly within a social taxonomy determined by class, occupation and other factors. It was an immense enterprise and I find it now, a hundred years later, rather an overwhelming one for the viewer. You can still get what seems to be the whole series of photographs in several volumes but what we can make of such a thing almost a hundred years after its inception? Thinking has changed so much and, since the second world war, political, economic, and philosophical trends have been to emphasise individuality rather than submerge it. Is the interest of Sander’s work therefore purely historical or is it sociological – can it still be a mirror for us to look at ourselves? The curators of the Tate exhibition seem to take the former view. They see his photographs as being a history of the Weimar Republic: “The faces of those he photographed show traces of this collective historical experience”. I looked hard but I couldn’t see that. The key to his work seems to me to lie more in the social sciences – the study of society and social relationships. These are comparative portraits: each exists in relation to the others. So a commentary which explored then contemporary ideas in sociology, psychology and ethnography might have opened the photographs up more for the visitor rather than a timeline of the rise of the Nazi party and the second world war. Zero in on those faces: are they really so historical? Is the photograph below a historical relic - or something rather more modern?
This is a fascinating exhibition: it is like looking at a jigsaw puzzle just as the picture is emerging from the disparate pieces – a picture which we would be hard put to assemble today.
Bohemians: Willi Bongard and Gottfried Brockmann. © August Sander Archive, Cologne.