Getty Museum

Priest and Acolyte, Sardinia

Date

1927

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

German

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> Throughout his life August Sander (1876-1864) preferred to work at home, in the areas around Cologne and the Rhineland. He seldom ventured into the big cities or the industrial belts of the Ruhr or Saar Rivers, focusing instead on the land and the people he knew best. This photograph was taken in 1927 on one of his rare excursions outside Germany. > > In 1926 Sander had been approached by the writer Ludwig Mathar (1882-1958) to collaborate on an illustrated volume on Sardinia. Known for a popular travel guide to Italy and several works of fiction, Mathar was a great admirer of Sander's. The following year the two journeyed south, spending three months on the Mediterranean island researching and taking pictures. Although the book they envisioned never materialized, the pair managed to publish a short article featuring Sander's photographs and a text by Mathar. > > Sander made more than five hundred negatives in Sardinia, most of which were picturesque studies of the island's old villages and the traditional ways still practiced by the inhabitants. The mysterious photograph of a priest and an acolyte is an anomaly within this body of work. The priest is seen blessing or anointing a young man kneeling before him in an earthen pit, the youth's gaze transfixed as if he were beholding a holy apparition. It is not known what the event signifies or how Sander came to witness it, but the image's strange ambiguities and evocativeness are reminiscent of his best work from the Westerwald. > > Adapted from *August Sander*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Claudia Bohn-Spector (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 40. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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