Getty Museum

[Courtyard musicians, Cologne]

Date

1928

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

German

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> August Sander’s ambitious project “Citizens of the Twentieth Century” was to be a physiognomic portrait of the German people, a comprehensive cultural history and social analysis in forty-five portfolios of photographs. Physiognomy, the study of systematic correspondence between a person’s facial features or body structure and his/her psychological character, gained in popularity in the nineteenth century and has served as disturbing justification for racial profiling, discrimination, and genocide in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. > > Within “Citizens of the Twentieth Century,” Sander planned to include a large section devoted to the modern city, containing ten portfolios with mixed thematic materials ranging from the street, the circus, itinerants, festivities, and city youth to servants, urban types, the persecuted, and political prisoners. The section was to include this photograph of two musicians, which Sander had made in 1928. > > At first sight, this is an image full of anecdote and local color, calling to mind the pictures of the popular Berlin photographer and graphic artist Heinrich Zille (1858-1929). An accordionist and a fiddler perform in what appears to be the interior courtyard of a big apartment building. A young woman is leaning out of a second-floor window, listening. In stark contrast to Zille's work, however, this portrait seems very carefully arranged, exhibiting the same staged formality of the image of the Gehlhausen children (see [84.XM.126.4](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34166/august-sander-farm-children-westerwald-german-1913/)). The accordionist, for instance, his instrument resting solidly on his velvet-covered lap, makes no attempt to play a tune. > > A determined opponent of the snapshot, Sander had little appreciation for the accidental dimensions of a scene. He incorporated narrative elements only to the extent that they prevented monotony. His photographs condense and concentrate time, highlighting the timeless over the temporal, the universal over the contingent. Luckily, he stayed clear of the > maudlin, picturesque depiction of “metropolitan types” that had been a key ingredient of urban iconography since the early nineteenth century. He wanted to engage viewers' critical faculties, rather than indulge their sentimental yearnings, thus opening the scene before his lens to deeper analysis. > > Adapted from *August Sander*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Claudia Bohn-Spector (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 60. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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