Getty Museum

[Dockworkers (Schauerleute)]

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 discrimination and racial profiling, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. > > Within “Citizens of the Twentieth Century,” the section on The Craftsman, comprised of four portfolios, was a highly fluid and amorphous construct. It contained many different occupations that did not easily fit a narrow artisanal definition. If Sander photographed industrial workers at all, he chose to represent them in ways that obscured their actual role within the German economy. A case in point is this portrait of a group of dockworkers standing in front of a brick building. A foreman, dressed in a white shirt and dark suit, is surrounded by his men in their occupational garb. The picture evokes time-honored guild ideals. It shows the men in their working environment, projecting a high level of professional satisfaction and pride in their labor. > > Dockers in Weimar Germany, however, belonged to the great pool of proletarian workers. As such, they had very little in common with their counterparts in the traditional crafts. They did not own the tools of their trade, and their products were the result of divided, industrial labor. As photographer and theorist Allan Sekula points out in *Fish Story* (1995), working conditions in Weimar naval yards were poor and gave rise to numerous militant uprisings. In 1923 a strike of sailors and longshoremen in Hamburg had led to a violent revolt that prompted one contemporary observer to claim in a 1924 issue of the *Communist International* that “the Hamburg fights furnish a superb lesson of the classical revolution, as it will eventually take its course in Germany.” > > The rebellious spirit emanating from the waterfront was duly noted by members of the German middle class, the audience at which Sander's larger project was directed. While he certainly sympathized with the political demands of the proletariat, due in part to his son Erich's (1903-1944) committed membership in the Communist Party, Sander nevertheless remained distant from its more radical goals. In this image he lends his subjects a surprisingly inoffensive air, thus distracting from any mutinous ambitions that they might harbor. > > Adapted from *August Sander*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Claudia Bohn-Spector (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 68. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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