Getty Museum

[Peasant family (Bauernfamilie)]

Date

1912

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

German

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> August Sander's treatment of the German farmer represents a unique homage to a vanishing era. It reflects, in part, the country's dramatic transition from a mostly agricultural society to an urban, industrialized state. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, 40 percent of the German population still worked in the countryside; by the mid-1920s, this number was cut almost in half. > > When Sander began to photograph in the Westerwald, he soon realized that his rural clients shared few of the aesthetic ideals that were dear to his middle-class customers in Cologne. The peasants demanded portraits that reflected their plain, earthbound way of life. He responded by eliminating from his art all traces of external manipulation and artifice in favor of formal simplicity and sharp pictorial definition. Sander advertised about 1910 that his goal was to create “simple, natural portraits that show the subjects in an environment corresponding to their own individuality.” > > The family shown here posed for Sander outdoors, at the edge of a pine forest near their home. The parents and two children—dressed in their Sunday outfits—are possibly on their way to or from church. They face the photographer with earnest solemnity, their impeccable dress, formal posture, and stern gazes betraying a strong sense of tradition and moral integrity. Sander photographed at least two other families in the same setting (see [84.XM.126.399](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34554/august-sander-untitled-dancers-german-about-1928-1933/)), perhaps suggesting a kinship between the trees in the background and the upright spirit of the peasants in the foreground. He included one of these pictures in the Portfolio of Archetypes that served as a preface to “Citizens of the Twentieth Century,” adding a generational dimension to his anthropological project (see [85.XM.258.75](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/53697/august-sander-three-generations-of-a-farming-family-westerwald-german-1912/)). By presenting new generations next to older ones, Sander showed how the past gives way to the future in never-ending cycles of renewal and regeneration. > > Adapted from *August Sander*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Claudia Bohn-Spector (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 16. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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