Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Although August Sander’s early work favored a fuzzy pictorialism, he quickly abandoned this style for a more objective approach. He is best known for his portraits of people from all walks of life in the series “Citizens of the Twentieth Century.” The honesty of these pictures set a new standard for photography and frightened the ruling Nazi party. In 1934, Sander’s work was confiscated and his eldest son arrested by the Gestapo.

As a consequence, Sanders turned to less political—and more relaxing—landscape subjects. Despite this change, he continued to incur Nazi pressure and had his studio ransacked a second time. His beautiful landscapes were published in Flora of the Rhine, Rhineland Architecture from the Time of Goethe to our Day, Man and Landscape after the war.