SANDER (Germany, 1876-1964)
Between organism and role
Dry photography, beginning in the years 1870, does not only comprise
Atget and Stieglitz, but also Riis and Hine. These two photographers, armed
with their now lighter tripod and with a flash that allowed them to work at
night, started visiting the New York slums to photograph and show the poor.
This time around, the medium largely served the theme. In turn, the
theme will stimulate the medium, and will reveal novel formal virtualities
(unusual shadows, shots sectioning objects haphazardly), and specifically
political-social ones, in a word, photography as a means of predication. Riis
– and Hine in particular – started organizing cleverly orchestrated
slide sessions. Riis, who starts in 1887 with the invention of the flash, only
wanted his photographs to be ‘a way of putting before the people what I saw
there’. Hine, who starts in 1904, displayed more ambition. In accordance with
the American dream, he showed the ‘good material at first’; the lively forces
of the youth that had to be liberated from the ‘making junk’, their
exploitation. Riis and his substitutes were oppressive. Hine was tonic. In the
thirties, he still photographed – intrepid – the acrobat workers
building skyscrapers.
Sander is neither a social worker nor a predicator, but a sociologist,
even an anthropologist. When, in his beginnings, he photographed peasants in
the area surrounding Koln, instead of looking from top to bottom as Hine would,
he looked, as a steel miner, from bottom to top. Hence, he not only sees the
rich or the poor, but, in the way of the proletarian according to Marx, he sees
Man himself or at least, Society itself, in the German society of his era. He
will complete his great work project ‘Citizens of the Twentieth Century’ in
1929 as Antlitz der Zeit, the title of the part published while he was alive. The word ‘Antlitz’
is a heavily charged poetical and mystical substantive made up of ‘ant-ent’
(coming to meet), and gothic ‘wlaiton’ (casting one’s gaze around oneself).
There is a Heideggerian dimension in the ‘Face’ that comes to meet Sander. Sein
und Zeit is dated
1927.
The outcome of Sander’s project will be fundamental anthropology. For
him, and without explicitly knowing it, mankind is the signed animal. It is an organism
invested with indicia of states (paleness, redness, shakes), like any animal organism. As a
standing, two-handed primate, it is also an organism invested with indexes (the finger, the nose, the sexual
organs), of digital referential signs (as the fingers can make out a square, a
circle, a triangle, or count from 1 to 10), and assuredly of analogical
referential signs,
in particular a more or less conscious image of the body itself.
We must retrospect the road travelled since Nadar. For the latter, when
romanticism switched to positivism, the heterogeneous layers (between
themselves) of the organism and the signs, of the organism to the role, and of
the organism and the craft, were all rather unified under the hot pressure of
the ‘genius’ physiology. Through the evanescence of the late century, then the
Great War, then the Weimar republic, this relationship distended itself. In any
event, from 1920, the role – and in particular the craft – begins
to be understood as a mechanic, which is either decomposable or re-composable
and whose body is only a support. Bauhaus analyses their former elements to recompose
them later, not only all the industrial, artistic, semiotic products, but also the human gestures that make them, right to the
theatrical gesture according to a universal Combinatory that reminds us of Leibniz’s
project. There is no better time than this era to understand what the body of a
notary, engineer, pictorial, or musician is, or to follow some human structures
circulating and varying in their craft, going from one role to another. In the
German Kulturgeschichte tradition, Spengler published the prodigious Der
Untergang des Abelandes from 1918 to 1922, a structural and existential anthropology of
civilizations.
What about photography? Well, it was pre-destined. Firstly because it
captured as many – if not more – indices than indicia and referential signs, and could
therefore let speak the articulations between body and role, between body and
craft, independently from the intentions of the portraitist. Then, it allowed
the portrayed body to animate – consciously or unconsciously – the
signs it was invested with, under the condition to work in the dark room and
the studio, subject to the constraints of the appointment and the pose, which
is reminiscent of the psychoanalytical séance. In the same fashion as Nadar,
virtually always excluding the model’s feet and legs that would have allowed it
to walk, hence dissipating its structure. Finally, an all-important detail:
offering the finished product on a bare paper; the peasants he photographed in
their environment could not care less for luxury prints, they only wanted their
image. However, Sander’s close friends remarked that these poor images were
much more structural and existential than rich images! When large distribution
prints won the war against singular prints, the essentialisation of roles and organisms was
accomplished, notes Szarkowski. In a 1910 print, a serf peasant appears in
infinitely subtle nuances (PN, 240); post 1920, the faces disclose their ‘elements’
in the bauhausian sense of the term to respond to the rawer details of
photoengraving (PN, 241).
The result was Sander’s ethnographic Combinatory. Portrayed by Sander,
or rather, portraying himself with Sander’s assistance, conductor Wilhelm
Furtwàngler (*PF,
153) informs us as to the jacket and tie (particularly Bauhaus) one should
wear, what angles should be defined between limbs and bust, what tension
between his eyes, brows, and nose, what seating position to adopt on the seat,
what diffuse unease should be encouraged, what weft the clothing should show to trigger Beethoven’s nine
symphonies like no one before or since has ever managed, not even Toscanini.
Bodies and roles thereby propose a game of functioning elements specific to
WORLD 3, rather than a bunch of attributes proceding from a focus, like in
Nadar’s work that still largely belongs to WORLD 2. This would not have been
the case had Furtwàngler appeared that same year before Erfurth’s ‘criminological’
camera, nonetheless of the same age (PN, 175-5).
However, all these logic-semiotic field effects, where organisms, indices,
indicia, analogical
and digital referential signs meet in compatibilitising coils must not lead us
away from Sander’s perceptive-motor field effects, which, like in Nadar’s work,
were in return intensified by the logical field effects they come across. It is
partly to do with structure, particularly with the definition of a square that
is neither too big nor too small, that allows for the positioning of oneself,
without which the roles would loose their combinatory articulation to turn
picturesque. It is also a question of texture, grain (of the skin, clothing,
leafage, construction timber) that must be firm, cellular, and neither too
large nor too small.
In his 1926 acme, Sander photographed what he titled L’oeil droit de
ma fuie Sigrid
(**BN, 232). Nothing can display more semiologically certain concepts like the
relationships between the organism (the eye) and the sense (the gaze). Nothing
indicates better the plastic relationships between horizontality and
verticality, emptiness and fullness, clear and obscure, bare and hairy, smooth
and granulated (of the skin) etc., hence, what perceptive topologies and
cybernetics had to be kept going to obtain ‘The Face of Time’ (Antlitz der
Zeit).
For the cover of Photography Until Now, Swarkowski chose the photograph of Sander’s ‘La
Petite Foraine’ dated 1932 (PN, 241). She looks at us through the opened window next to the closed window of
her trailer; her arm forms a right angle on the outside to reach the key in the
lock. Among all these vertical and horizontal angles, her face is also made up
of vertical and horizontal rectangles. The wood has the required grain to
spread the combinatory of the structure and the texture.
Henri Van Lier
A photographic history of photography
in Les Cahiers de la Photographie, 1992
List of abbreviations of common references:
PN: Photography until Now, Museum of Modem Art.
BN: Beaumont Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images, Museum of Modem Art.
PF: Kozloff, Photography and Fascination, Addison.
The acronyms (*), (**), (***) refer to
the first, second, and third illustration of the chapters, respectively. Thus,
the reference (*** AP, 417) must be interpreted as: “This refers to the third
illustration of the chapter, and you will find a better reproduction, or a
different one, with the necessary technical specifications, in The Art of
Photography listed under
number 417”.