[Forest]

From the Getty Museum record

> By the late 1930s August Sander's career as a professional photographer was basically over. No official explanation had ever been given of why his 1929 book *Face of the Time* had been confiscated, but it is likely that it represented too complex and ambiguous a picture of German society than was acceptable to Nazi ideologues. As early as 1929 a critic from the Far Right had dismissed the book as “a physiognomic document of anarchy, of inferior instincts and of indiscriminate greed, rather than a document of uplift, enthusiasm, let alone essence.” > > Now in his early sixties, Sander spent most of his time reprinting and rearranging old negatives and making pictures in the countryside. He traveled along the Rhine and into the Siebengebirge, detecting in the gently sloping hills the same human spirit he had already documented in the faces of his contemporaries. “Like language,” he had observed in a radio lecture in 1931, “[landscape] is stamped by man and his work. . . . The landscape, confined by the boundaries of a common language, yields the physiognomical time exposure of a nation.” > > The dense, impenetrable thicket of foliage in this photograph may be indicative of the confusion and disillusionment Sander may have felt at this time in his life. While he had been making images of the Rhineland since the early 1920s, he now focused his attention almost exclusively on landscape photography (see also: [84.XM.126.444](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34599/august-sander-untitled-forest-german-about-1930-1940/), [84.XM.126.445](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34600/august-sander-untitled-forest-german-about-1930-1940/), [84.XM.152.76](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/35841/august-sander-untitled-forest-german-about-1930-1940/), [84.XM.126.80](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34241/august-sander-paul-hindemith-composer-paul-hindemith-komponist-german-about-1925/), [84.XM.126.92](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34253/august-sander-untitled-family-german-about-1920-1925/), [84.XM.126.129](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34290/august-sander-youth-movement-jugendbewegung-german-1923/)). Like many other artists of the time, Sander remained in Germany but was unable to continue the politically sensitive portrait work that was his passion. He shared this fate with the painter Otto Dix (1881-1969), who told the art historian Hans Rinkel in 1961: “I painted landscapes. That was tantamount to emigration.” > > Originally published in *August Sander*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Claudia Bohn-Spector (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 96. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.