Pixiq

The horror movie, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920) is a visually striking, hauntingly beautiful film. Watching it on YouTube the other day, one scene caught my attention. Three men enter a fairground. They are on screen for only a few seconds but I recognized them immediately. They had stepped out of a photograph taken by August Sander. If you don’t know about Sander and his gigantic photographic project, let me tell you about him.

Born in 1876 in the Westerwald region of Germany, after his education Sander opened a portrait studio in Cologne. In 1910 he set out to, “frame the individual classes as well as their surroundings; I hope to provide a true psychology of our time and of our people.” That is he decided to make a photographic catalog of every “type” of person in Germany; from peasant to physician, farmer’s wife to actor, a work that would be monumental. He called it “People of the 20th Century” and it soon filled over 45 portfolios. These were each divided into seven sections with categories like “The Farmer,” “The City” and “The Artists.” By the beginning of World War II, Sander had made over twenty thousand images.

I discovered Sander’s work in the 1970s and in 2009 had the chance to see his photos at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris. The show and the book of the exhibition were entitled, “Seeing, Observing and Thinking.” Wise words that every photographer should recall each time they raise a camera to their eye. I’ve loaded some of his photographs into the Gallery to see the breadth and scope of his work. 

Both “People of the 20^th Century” and “Dr. Caligari” are products of the Weimar Republic that began after World War I ended. The Great War had left Europe broken and disillusioned. There were nearly 20 million military and civilian dead. Nations faced a widening income gap, governments were in chaos, and people had lost faith in the future. However while almost everything else was going to hell, the arts were flourishing. Most of us have some knowledge of this period from the movie “Cabaret,” or the work of composers like Alban Berg and Bernard Goldschmidt and the paintings of Max Ernst and Paul Klee. Sander in this period was part of the "Group of Progressive Artists" in Cologne.

The photo of the three young men was taken in 1914, in the German Wersterwald region. Going beyond simple portraiture it is a classic Sander photograph. Sander worked with a large format, glass plate camera, the kind primarily used in portrait studios. He took advantage of the lens’ narrow depth of field to throw the backgrounds and environments around his subjects out of focus. This adds a strange quality to the images. Sharply focused individuals seem to exist in a soft edged, dream world. The subjects themselves often stare at the viewer with a kind of madness in their eyes. This style of image making was later to be adopted by other photographers, like Diane Arbus who also saw Sander’s work when it came to America in the 1970s. 

Looking at the photo of the three young men we see them dressed in their Sunday best, their hats at a jaunty angle and their fancy walking sticks in hand. They are rural types and may be going to a country wedding. Like so many young men, they wear their suits uncomfortably, They are in sharp focus with weight and substance yet they are in a landscape that is vast, weightless, and soft focused. 

Moreover, there is an added poignancy to this picture, which is explains the cameo appearance in Caligari. Just three years after this photo was taken these young men and millions more would find themselves in uniform. Many of these young men would die pointlessly, in the bloody trenches of Verdun or the Marne. Great artists are attuned to culture and through their arts show not only what is but how it feels. Robert Wiene, the director of Caligari, shot the film in 1919-1920. It is both an allegorical remembrance of the war and a warning about the autocratic tendencies Wiene saw swirling about the Continent. Around this same time Sander was showing his images in Cologne and elsewhere, and that is how Wiene probably saw the photo. 

Caligari reflects the chaos of those days after the war. Done in the German Expressionistic style it’s bizarre, sharply, tilted sets and weird lighting resemble a world that has been shattered like a piece of glass. It unnerves the viewer. In the film, when the three men enter the fairground (a place of chaos) they come upon Caligari’s booth. Dr.Caligari (a delusional autocrat) has a sideshow exhibit featuring a somnambulist. Cesare is a young man who has been asleep for 25 years. He is under Caligari’s spell and murders upon his command. I think that Wiene is speaking here of the passivity of the millions of young men who fought in the Great War. Cesare is their contemporary. These men murdered each other relentlessly. It was the first “modern” war fought with aerial bombs and gas. But it was a war fought for little reason other then the treaties of empires; that is simply upon the command of delusional political, leaders. 

In 1933 the Weimar Republic collapsed and the Nazi Party took power. Modern art was labeled “degenerate” and destroyed. Hundreds of artists fled Germany. Sander himself went into internal exile. He took with him several thousand glass plate negatives but thousands more were left behind and lost. It took Sander over a decade after the war to pull his life together and be “re-discovered.” 

Sander’s “People of the 20^th Century,” in which he sought to show the unity of the German people in all their variety infuriated the Nazis.The mammoth project completely repudiated the Nazi propaganda claim that the Germans were a superior “race” of tall, Aryan, blonde-haired people. In image after image, he showed a nation made up of a wide range of “types. ” Many, like his three young farmers, were short and dark and hardly Aryan. 

Sander spoke truth to power and for that reason the Nazis did their best to destroy him and his art. While Sander managed to survive the War, he lost a son. Erich Sander died in a Nazi concentration camp ironically along side hundreds of the very people his father had photographed. 

For more on August Sander and the Weimar Republic

“Seeing, Observing and Thinking” August Sander Photographs, Schrimer, Mosel 2009

In Focus; August Sander, Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum. J. Paul Getty Trust, 2000

August Sander Archiv and Susanne Lange, August Sander: People of the 20th Century, 7 vols, 2002, Harry N. Abrams.

Photo of August Sander by Imogen Cunningham, courtesy Meg Partridge, the Cunningham Trust   www.imogencunningham.com

For more on this period: Weimar Germany Promise and Tragedy, Weitz, Eric D. Princeton University Press 2007

To see the movie “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALqnSUMHPrA&feature=watch-now-button&wide=1