Abstract

Published in 1929, August Sander’s photobook Face of Our Time is one of the most celebrated photographic documents of the ill-fated Weimar Republic. Although Sander’s photobook included a broad typological spectrum of Weimar society and was eventually censured under National Socialism in 1936, scholars such as Leesa Rittelmann and George Baker have argued that Sander’s decision to foreground six portraits of peasant farmers at the outset of Face of Our Time can be understood as comparable to the romanticization of rural Aryan “types'' found in slightly later right-wing publications such as Erna Lendvai-Dircksen’s Face of the German Race of 1932. In response to this claim, I contend that this is a misinterpretation of Sander’s use of the peasant “type” which has cast the photographer’s œuvre in an undeservedly reactionary light. By drawing attention to Sander’s inclusion of key images of social change within the typological category of the peasant, I argue that Sander’s foregrounding of the peasant “type” is, in fact, a progressive acknowledgment of modernization rather than a reactionary statement on the disappearance of traditional, rural ways of life. In support of my argument, I carry out close readings of the six photographs in question while also attending to the ways in which these images form a narrative that asserts social change over fixed typological continuity. In doing so, my research sheds light on the ambiguous politics at the heart of Sander’s body of work and the ideological mutability of the peasant “motif” within twentieth-century German visual culture.