Getty Museum

Young Girl in a Circus Wagon, Düren (84.XM.126.223)

Date

1929

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 intended to include a large section devoted to The City, containing ten portfolios with mixed thematic materials. Under this general rubric, Sander planned to devote two of the portfolios to Traveling People. They were to include portraits of circus performers, carnival vendors, gypsies, and other itinerants—people on the fringes of society. Sander, despite his conservative position, showed considerable sympathy and understanding of such individuals. “This is a class of people which, with a few exceptions, now belongs to the past,” he remarked about the portfolio (cited in *August Sander: “In Photography There Are No Unexplained Shadows”* [1994]). “It is very interesting to talk to these people: one learns a great deal about their circumstances and the deeper meaning of their lives. I wish to give neither a critique nor a description of these people, but only to create a piece of contemporary history with my pictures, a little romance in a materialistic age.” > > In this photograph of a young girl from the fairgrounds, Sander frames her delicate face against the grimy facade of a carnival wagon. By doing so, he immediately identifies her as a social outcast—a marginal type whose innocent expression strangely belies her seedy milieu. Through the open window in the door she holds the key in the outside lock and meets the camera with a dreamy, melancholy look. Behind her lies a world that is dark and inaccessible to the viewer. A suggestive, almost tantalizing narrative unfolds: of freedom and confinement, security and danger, things visible and hidden. Here Sander’s interest in physiognomy reveals itself as a marker of boundaries, a way of defining social difference. By holding the key, the girl evokes the possibility of transgression, subtly challenging Sander's classificatory gaze. > > Adapted from *August Sander*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Claudia Bohn-Spector (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 76. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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