Getty Museum

[Coal Carrier, Berlin (Berliner Kohlenträger)]

Date

1929

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

German

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> In addition to the assumption that civilizations evolve in cyclical patterns, August Sander believed that society was organized according to a hierarchy of occupations. He planned to arrange his photographs within his “Citizens of the Twentieth Century” project according to an “estate” or “guild” system (for more information on this ambitious project, see [84.XM.126.282](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34437/august-sander-shepherd-hirte-german-1913/) and [84.XM.126.83](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34244/august-sander-portrait-of-two-men-german-negative-1912-print-1920s/)). Guilds, in medieval times, were associations of persons of the same trade formed for mutual protection and the maintenance of professional standards. They were fraternities of merchants and artisans and had distinct social and political functions. > > As art historian Ulrich Keller has observed, Sander's guild system frequently clashed with the actual division of wealth and power in Weimar society. In August Sander: *Citizens of the Twentieth Century* Keller points in particular to the guild system's incompatibility with historian Oswald Spengler's (1880-1936) philosophy of decadence. If indeed twentieth-century society consisted of a healthy, solid guild structure, as Sander proposed, how could this assumption be reconciled with his simultaneous postulate of an unstable, gradually deteriorating society? It was a contradiction that the artist either did not recognize or was unable to solve. Whatever its theoretical shortcomings, Sander's guild system served him well in his outline of the preindustrial trades. In the finest gradations he was able to show the traditional craft structure from apprentice to journeyman to master. > > In this picture, taken in 1929, Sander captures a coal carrier in Berlin stepping out of a building. In his system, the worker is immediately identified as belonging to the lower ranks of manual labor. His place, Sander seems to suggest, is deep inside the bowels of German society—like the dark basement from which he emerges. > > Adapted from *August Sander*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Claudia Bohn-Spector (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 64. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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