Getty Museum

Blind children (Blindenkinder) (84.XM.126.107)

Date

about 1930

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

German

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> In the early 1920s August Sander made a series of photographs in a home for the blind in Düren, southwest of Cologne. Photo historian Gabriele Conrath-Scholl has suggested that this might have been commissioned work, intended to raise money or recognition for the institution. The images show the children and young adults in the context of their daily setting, without visual praise or criticism. Here, Sander's naturalism works against traditional notions of medical photography, as it was practiced, for example, by British psychiatrist Hugh Welch Diamond (1809-1886) and other nineteenth-century documentarians of such asylums. Rather than highlighting the pathology of the blind children, Sander focuses instead on their common humanity. > > This full-length portrait of two adolescent girls was made about 1921. Unable to see, they face the camera in a vague imitation of traditional posing principles. The incredible interlocking of their hands is the emotional center of the image—their warm, comforting touch creates an innate empathetic response that elevates the picture to a poignant humanistic statement. The girls' lack of vision is almost compensated for by the intensity of their embrace. > > 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), 84. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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