"Antlitz der Zeit" ("Face of out time") by August Sander (1876-1964 - ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT and MOST INFLUENTIAL GERMAN PHOTOBOOKS ever published and a CLASSIC OF ITS GENRE, mentioned in all books about photobooks. - Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 books, page 52/53 - Martin Parr, Gerry Badger, The Photobook, volume 1, page 124 - The Open Book, Hasselblad Center, page 84/85 - 802 photo boos from the M. + M. Auer collection, page 139 - Manfred Heiting, Autopsie I, pages 302-309 August Sander "was part of a coterie of photographers who established the photographic book as an aesthetically and commercially viable art form in the 1920s. Though Sander had published one such book in 1924, Unsere Heimat, Hannover, it was the 1929 publication of Antlitz der Zeit (The Face of Our Time) that propelled him into enduring fame. (Warren, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography) Welcome to the "GERMAN PHOTOBOOKS" auction by Ecki Heuser (5Uhr30.com, Cologne) - with more than 100 fantastic lots. IF YOU WIN MORE THAN 1 OF MY BOOKS IN THIS AUCTION, YOU WILL PAY ONLY 1 X SHIPPING COSTS - WORLDWIDE. These photographs, with their combination of stark objectivity and sympathy for the human condition, stand out as high points of photographic portraiture. They exerted a profound influence on later generations of photographers, among them Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, and collectively proposed the idea of the archive as a mode of artistic enquiry. August Sander was one of the most significant portrait photographers working in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. In the early 1920s, he moved away from the atmospheric, pictorialist style that characterised his earlier work in favour of an objective approach to his subjects. In 1924, August Sander began "Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts ("People of the Twentieth Century"), an "ambitious long-term project" to compile a comprehensive, inclusive visual record of the German people. "Antlitz der Zeit" ("Face of Our Time") is the first published version of this series and the only version supervised by August Sander in his lifetime. His inclusion of German citizens of various faiths, such as well as the unemployed, the disabled and other marginalised elements of German society, incurred the disapproval of the National Socialist party, and in 1936 the Nazis confiscated and destroyed unsold copies of Antlitz der Zeit and all of the printing plates. Transmare Verlag und Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1929. First edition, first printing. Yellow cloth-covered flexible boards, spine and front stamped in dark grey. 214 x 286 mm. 122 pages. 60 numered photos in black and white photographs printed in relief halftone. Photos: August Sander. 17 pages with text. Text: Alfred Döblin. Text in German. Condition: Inside clean with no marks; first blank page with creases, stronger foxed at the beginning and at the end, but all text and all photo pages fresh. Outside used and a bit stained; foxed at the edges. Overall very good condition. August Sander's first and best book - very scarce and hard to find in any condition. "Many of his classic images are included in this seminal photobook, and the essential qualities of Sander's vision can be seen. He took typical examples of professions, trades and social classes in Weimar Germany, and photographed them in their familiar environments in order to build up, piece by piece, a dispassionate image of the 'face' of society. One of his work's miracles is how, despite his nominal objectivity, his political view shines through. His work is not neutral. It is not just penetrating, but was seen as positively dangerous, a little too acute in its analysis of society and class, by those with certain vested interests. This is made clear by the fact that when the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, publisher's copies of Antlitz der Zeit were seized, the plates destroyed, and the negatives confiscated by Hitler's Ministry of Culture" - Gerry Badger - "Sander was born on November 17, 1876 in Herdorf, the son of a carpenter working in the mining industry. He had six siblings. While working at the local Herdorf iron-ore mine, Sander first learned about photography by assisting a photographer from Siegen who was also working for the mining company. With financial support from his uncle, he bought photographic equipment and set up his own darkroom. Sander spent his military service (1897–1899) as an assistant to Georg Jung of Trier; they worked throughout Germany including in Berlin, Magdeburg, Halle, Leipzig and Dresden. In 1901, he started working for Photographische Kunstanstalt Greif photo studio in Linz, Austria-Hungary, becoming a partner in 1902, and then sole-owner. In the late 1940's he joined the Upper Austrian Art Society. Sander left Linz at the end of 1909 or 1910 and set up a new studio at Dürener Strasse 201 in the Lindenthal district of Cologne. In 1911, Sander began with the first series of portraits for his work People of the 20th Century. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic. The series is divided into seven sections: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People (homeless persons, veterans, etc.). In the early 1920s, he came in contact with the Cologne Progressives, a radical group of artists linked to the workers' movement, which, as Wieland Schmied put it, "sought to combine constructivism and objectivity, geometry and object, the general and the particular, avant-garde conviction and political engagement, and which perhaps approximated most to the forward looking of New Objectivity [...] ". In 1927, Sander and writer Ludwig Mathar travelled through Sardinia for three months, where he took around 500 photographs. However, a planned book detailing his travels was not completed. Sander's Face of our Time was published in 1929. It contains a selection of 60 portraits from his series People of the 20th Century, and is introduced by an essay by Alfred Döblin titled "On Faces, Pictures, and their Truth". Under the Nazi regime, his work and personal life were greatly constrained. Sander's 1929 book Face of our Time was seized in 1936 and the photographic plates destroyed. Around 1942, during World War II, he left Cologne and moved to the small village of Kuchhausen, in the Westerwald region; this allowed him to save the most important part of his body of work. His Cologne studio was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid, but tens of thousands of negatives, which he had left behind in a basement near his former apartment in the city, survived the war. 25,000 to 30,000 negatives in this basement were then destroyed in a 1946 fire.[4] That same year, Sander began his postwar photographic documentation of the city. He also tried to record the mass rape of German women by Red Army soldiers in the Soviet occupation zone. In 1953, Sander sold a portfolio of 408 photographs of Cologne, taken between 1920 and 1939, to the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum. These would be posthumously published in book format in 1988, under the title Köln wie es war (Cologne as it was). In 1962, 80 photographs from the People of the 20th Century project were published in book format, under the name Deutschenspiegel. Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (German Mirror. People of the 20th Century). Sander married Anna Seitenmacher in 1902. They gave birth to Erich (son, born in 1903) and Gunther (son, born in 1907), and girl twins in 1911, Sigrid and Helmut, only Siugrid survived. Anna died on May 27 1957 in Kuchhausen, Germany. Erich, who was a member of the left wing Socialist Workers' Party (SAP), was arrested by Nazis in 1934 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he died of an untreated ruptured appendix in 1944,[4] shortly before the end of his sentence. Sander died in Cologne of a stroke on 20 April 1964. He was buried next to his son Erich in Cologne's Melaten Cemetery. In 1984 Sander was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum. In Wim Wenders' 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin ("Wings of Desire"), the character Homer (played by Curt Bois) studies the portraits of People of the 20th Century (1980 edition) while visiting a library. In 2008, the Mercury crater Sander was named after him. The highest price reached by one of his photographs was when Bricklayer sold by $749.000 at Sotheby's New York, on 11 December 2014." (Wikipedia)