Getty Museum

Young Bourgeois Mother

Date

1926

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

German

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> August Sander (1876-1864) first announced his physiognomic project in 1927, when he showed his photographs in an exhibition of modern art at the Cologne Kunstverein. “I am often asked,” he wrote in a statement in conjunction with the exhibition, “how I came upon the idea of creating this work: Look, Observe, and Think and the question is answered. Nothing seemed more appropriate to me than to render through photography a picture of our times which is absolutely true to nature.” Titled “Citizens of the Twentieth Century,” this ambitious project was to present a comprehensive cultural history and social analysis of the German people in forty-five portfolios of photographs. In the introductory Portfolio of Archetypes he established an inventory of core features—a physiognomic “baseline”—against which all other social classes and professions would be measured. 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. > > Here Sander used his considerable talent on a young woman posing with her baby son and pinscher. Her loosely cut linen dress, bobbed hair, and relaxed posture exude an air of refined affluence, suggesting that she is enjoying material comforts and plenty of leisure. In *Face of the Time*, a book of sixty photographs published in 1929 and intended as a preview of Sander’s larger effort, she is identified as a member of the German bourgeoisie, a modern housewife and mother. > > Sander preferred to depict his female sitters in traditional roles, in sharp contrast to the increasing importance and political power of women in Weimar Germany. By the mid-1920s over eleven million female wage earners reported to work each day, representing one-third of the entire German labor force. Yet Sander devoted only a single portfolio in “Citizens of the Twentieth Century” to them, and in it they appear mostly nameless, in the company of their husbands and children. By reducing the millions of working women to a small minority, Sander skewed the historical record, revealing one of the many blind spots in his analytical project. His photographs, rather than presenting the world “absolutely true to nature,” instead offer an interpretation, a window onto the world as it was perceived from a white male perspective. > > Adapted from *August Sander*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Claudia Bohn-Spector (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 46. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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