Great Photographers: August Sander

Ovation TV (an arts channel on DirecTV - feels like the old Bravo, and YAY for that) did a week long special on photography. Sadly, I stumbled on it yesterday - the last day - but luckily was able to tivo all 6 episodes of the documentary "The Genius of Photography."

For actual photography students and professionals, the doc may feel rudimentary, but for amateurs and newbies like myself, it's a great backgrounder for where photography came from, where it is today, and where it's headed.

I'm inspired to catalog some of the great photographers featured in the doc, and hopefully continue sharing great photographers I discover in the future.



Best known for his influential (and banned/burned by the Nazi's) book Face of Our Time and his definitive collection People of the Twentieth Century, August Sander is considered the father of modern portrait photography. His unerring eye caught faces of all types, and he perfectly captured each subject's 'human-ness' - that which made them frail, flawed, noble, and real. His photos show a depth of feeling and present in complete stark reality how every detail makes a person an individual.

Sander also highlights for me the usefulness of photography in typology. Though cataloguing and recording people can have evil intent (as with the aforementioned Nazi's, who objected to Sander's photographs on the grounds that the subjects did not represent the Aryan ideal), photography allows us to access, see and understand groups of people at a macro level. The digitalization of photography has especially democratized the discipline - for example, see here (a very stylish typologist), here (a communal style typology), and here (an urban typology).

sourced: Wiki, Getty