Getty Museum

Circus Usherettes with Programs (84.XM.498.14)

Date

about 1930–1932

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. In the early 1930s August Sander made several images of traveling circus folk, depicting them sitting on the steps of their brightly colored wagons or resting in between performances next to the big top (see [84.XM.498.5](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/40587/august-sander-group-of-circus-people-zirkusleute-german-about-1930-1932/) and [84.XM.126.214](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34374/august-sander-circus-people-zirkusleute-german-about-1930-1932/)). The entertainers' heavy makeup, rhinestone costumes, and casual demeanor provide a welcome reprieve from the regime of middle-class propriety laid out in Sander’s earlier portfolios. Here a pair of circus usherettes pose for the photographer in their uniforms and pillbox hats, presenting their program leaflets like vocational IDs. Sander elegantly renders their different poses, gestures, and body types against the two-toned wooden backdrop. The women confront the camera self-confidently and without false pretense, proudly advertising the Circus Barum. > > 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), 78. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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