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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
How do you book your place in an August Sander photograph? Well, it helps to be German, and to have lived in the first half of the twentieth century. You should be a farmer, perhaps, with a rutted face and a wrinkled coat, heading off to church along a dirt road in the Westerwald, the region outside Cologne, sometime around 1925. That is how Sander sees you, and that is how he wants you to remain: full length in the frame, from the hazy air above your top hat to the shine on your toe caps. He likes the way you cock your hand against your hip, like the handle of a cup; neither fey nor jaunty, but as though you were propping yourself up. After all, he has already noticed the fatigue in the grooves around your mouth and the skin that sags over the far corners of your eyes. As so often with Sander, there is next to nothing behind you--a gray blur of farm buildings, the track winding away, but little to distract us from the sense that all we need, in order to get the fullest measure of you, is you.
Sander was born in 1876 and lived until 1964; he came to photography in the early eighteen-nineties and stayed with it to his death. By any standards, the years in which he flourished were some of the most traumatic imaginable, and yet he remains among the least traumatized of modern artists. No blood is spilled in his pictures; none of the people would even dream of removing their clothes; no activity is so sudden or spasmodic that it threatens the sharpness of the image, which is recorded on a glass plate whose shortest side is at least a foot long. This is not to say that Sander was one of those molluscoid figures who crouch in their shells, refining their fantasies within; on the contrary, he never lost faith in what could be yielded by a close inspection of his countrymen, and the only person who escapes a full inquiry is Sander himself. There is a self-portrait from 1925--entitled "Photographer," nothing else--and he seems, with his wing collar, his receding hair, and his air of pointed kindness, to be a man whom you would like to know. He looks more like your bank manager, or your dentist, than the man who can grant you the immortality of art. But his character is hard to discern amid the vast, typically well-ordered archive of his work. He is a cipher, and he contains multitudes.
A fine selection from that throng can now be seen in San Francisco, at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit, which runs until February 23rd, consists of more than two hundred photographs. Some will be recognized even by those who go blank at the name Sander. His famous "Pastry Cook," for instance, taken in 1928, has been widely reproduced, but it looks all the more edible in its original gelatin-silver print. Round as a bun, topped with a head like a shining cherry, the master of his craft stands firm and square on the tiles of his kitchen, one hand clasping the inch-thick handle of a spoon or whisk, the other curled around the handle of a large mixing bowl, whose curves are a perfect match for the swell of his paunch. There is not an ounce of mockery in the mixture, and the pastry-maker himself would...
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