Preserving an Era Image by Image

THREE young German farmers are strolling down a weedy path on their way to a dance in a neighboring village. They are dressed like dandies in matching dark suits with high collars, fancy hats and walking sticks. It is a Saturday evening during the summer of 1914. In this part of Germany, between the towns of Dünebusch and Hallscheid, in the Westerwald, near Cologne, the countryside is flat and nondescript. The farmers come upon a man with a bicycle. Or maybe he was waiting at that spot for them. They probably know him. He is from the area, a photographer who has been taking pictures of people there, and everyone knows each other in these small villages. He has set up his bulky camera on a tripod. He poses the farmers. "Turn like that," we might imagine him saying. "Now face toward me. A little more." When the shutter releases, the three farmers are caught as if in mid-stride, looking at him, pretending to have just noticed he is there. The barren background in the photograph turns blurry. To see this famous image in the August Sander show now at the Metropolitan Museum is to be reminded how everything about the picture, which teeters so precariously between a snapshot and a formal portrait, between past and future, is strange and unnatural: these country flâneurs standing in the middle of nowhere, one of them with a cigarette delicately dangling from his lips, another holding up a hand self-consciously with thumb touching index finger. All three try to appear casual and spontaneous but clearly register the gravity of the moment when the camera will preserve them for posterity.

"Young Farmers" (1914)

August Sander

Young Bourgeois Mother, Cologne

In this idyllic image of Frau Steinrücke with her child and small dog, August Sander depicted a scene of leisure specifically associated with middle-class Weimar Germany. Seated on the grass, the baby smiles at the camera while the mother gazes contentedly and the dog stands proudly beside her. The absent father is presumably at work. One scholar astutely observed that, although "Sander claimed that his photographs were primarily documentary, . . . they also inevitably articulated anxieties and desires shared by many of his contemporaries." Germany in the mid-1920s experienced political and economic chaos. By posing a woman with her child in a landscape, Sander emphasized women's domestic role and tie to nature rather than their increasing political and wage-earning power. Perhaps because it reinforces traditional social tenets, this portrait conveys a sense of stability and calm, despite the fact that it was made during a period of fragmentation and turmoil.

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