Getty Museum

Parlamentarian of the Democratic Party, (Abgeordneter, Demokrat)]

Date

1928

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 planned to incorporate one portfolio devoted exclusively to the politician. As art historian Ulrich Keller has pointed out, Sander did not have access to the higher echelons of the German political establishment and had to content himself with the sometimes rather odd players populating the lower ranks. “German politics of the 1920s,” Keller wrote in *August Sander: Citizens of the Twentieth Century* (1986), “was a playground for the frustrated and the displaced, who sought in party membership what private life had denied them.” Assembled in front of Sander's lens were representatives from the fringes of the political spectrum: the founders of the League of Spiritual Renewal and the Socialist Workers Party as well as functionaries of the German Communist Party. It was probably Sander's son Erich (1903-1944), a theology student and a Communist himself, who introduced his father to many of them. > > In this portrait, made in 1928, Sander presents the businessman and parliamentarian Johannes Scheerer. He is standing against a neutral backdrop, wearing a large black cape, cutaway collar, and wide-brimmed hat. He shoulders his umbrella like a shotgun, measuring up the viewer with an owlish, suspicious glance. Behind this formidable facade seems to lurk a man of many idiosyncrasies, a strange bird more akin to a provincial schoolmaster than a legislator. > > Adapted from *August Sander*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Claudia Bohn-Spector (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 52. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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