Free On Photography by Susan Sontag

contains no mystery. Like Eadweard Muybridge, whose photographic studies in the 1880s managed to dispel misconceptions about what everybody had always seen (how horses gallop, how people move) because he had subdivided the subject’s movements into a precise and lengthy enough sequence of shots, Sander aimed to shed light on the social order by atomizing it, into an indefinite number of social types. It doesn’t seem surprising that in 1934, five years after its publication, the Nazis impounded the unsold copies of Sander’s book Antlitz der Zeit (The Face of Our Time) and destroyed the printing blocks, thus bringing his national-portrait project to an abrupt end. (Sander, who stayed in Germany throughout the Nazi period, switched to landscape photography.) The charge was that Sander’s project was anti-social. What might well have seemed anti-social to Nazis was his idea of the photographer as an impassive census-taker, the completeness of whose record would render all commentary, or even judgment, superfluous.
    Unlike most photography with a documentary intention, enthralled either by the poor and unfamiliar, as preeminently photographable subjects, or by celebrities, Sander’s social sample is unusually, conscientiously broad. He includes bureaucrats and peasants, servants and society ladies, factory workers and industrialists, soldiers and gypsies, actors and clerks. But such variety does not rule out class condescension. Sander’s eclectic style gives him away. Some photographs are casual, fluent, naturalistic; others are naive and awkward. The many posed photographs taken against a flat white background are a cross between superb mug shots and old-fashioned studio portraits. Unselfconsciously, Sander adjusted his style to the social rank of the person he was photographing. Professionals and the rich tend to be photographed indoors, without props. They speak for themselves. Laborers and derelicts are usually photographed in a setting (often outdoors) which locates them, which speaks for them—as if they could not be assumed to have the kinds of separate identities normally achieved in the middle and upper classes.
    In Sander’s work everybody is in place, nobody is lost or cramped or off-center. A cretin is photographed in exactly the same dispassionate way as a bricklayer, a legless World War I veteran like a healthy young soldier in uniform, scowling Communist students like smiling Nazis, a captain of industry like an opera singer. “It is not my intention either to criticize or describe these people,” Sander said. While one might have expected that he would have claimed not to have criticized his subjects, by photographing them, it is interesting that he thought he hadn’t described them either. Sander’s complicity with everybody also means a distance from everybody. His complicity with his subjects is not naive (like Carell’s) but nihilistic. Despite its class realism, it is one of the most truly abstract bodies of work in the history of photography.
    It is hard to imagine an American attempting an equivalent of Sander’s comprehensive taxonomy. The great photographic portraits of America—like Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959)—have been deliberately random, while continuing to reflect the traditional relish of documentary photography for the poor and the dispossessed, the nation’s forgotten citizens. And the most ambitious collective photographic project ever undertaken in this country, by the Farm Security Administration in 1935, under the direction of Roy Emerson Stryker, was concerned exclusively with “low-income groups.” [1] The FSA project, conceived as “a pictorial documentation of our rural areas and rural problems” (Stryker’s words), was unabashedly propagandistic, with Stryker coaching his team about the attitude they were to take toward their problem subject. The purpose of the project was to demonstrate the value of the