Getty Museum

[Blacksmiths (Schmiede)].

Date

1926

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

German

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> It is not exactly clear when the notion of physiognomy, the study of systematic correspondence between a person’s facial features or body structure to a person’s psychological character, entered August Sander's thinking or how rigid a system he actually followed. The idea consistently runs through his commentary on his photographs and dominated the critical reception of *Face of the Time*, a book of sixty photographs that was intended as a preview of his larger effort, “Citizens of the Twentieth Century,” in the late 1920s and early 1930s. > > During antiquity and the Middle Ages, physiognomy was a mostly speculative and intuitive discipline concerned with the understanding of bodily appearances and their relationship to the mind. The field gained semi-scientific status in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, primarily due to the efforts of Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801), Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), and Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Lavater, in particular, worked to establish a classificatory method that allowed him to draw scientific conclusions from what he saw in the faces of others. During the Weimar years physiognomy's positivist stance and ability to highlight differences was of particular relevance for a society in search of order. Following the loss of World War I, the dissolution of the Wilhelmine empire, and the threat of revolution, Sander's pictorial taxonomy was one of many contemporary attempts to grasp a social reality that was moving exceedingly beyond control. > > As the market for physiognomic photographs in Germany flourished, Sander frequently printed details of larger compositions, showcasing his subjects' features. This is demonstrated by this picture of two blacksmiths and two close-ups printed from the same negative (see [84.XM.126.340](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34495/august-sander-blacksmith-schmied-german-1926/) and [84.XM.126.341](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34496/august-sander-blacksmith-schmied-german-1926/)), as well as by his portrait of a mason (see [84.XM.126.239](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/34399/august-sander-untitled-woman-german-about-1938/)). It is likely that Sander created these enlargements for sale to commercial picture agencies, thereby taking advantage of an economic constellation that promised additional income from his work. > > Physiognomy has served as disturbing justification for racial profiling, discrimination and genocide in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For more information on “Citizens of the Twentieth Century,” 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/). > > Adapted from *August Sander*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Claudia Bohn-Spector (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 70. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.