The head of the design team at Topspin mentioned that there happened to be an exhibition of August Sander’s ‘People of the Twentieth Century’ at the Getty, so I spent the majority of my Saturday wandering around rediscovering the project. My timing was serendipitous – the show will be closing in about a week, and the perspective provided a nice natural break from the documentary headspace I’ve occupied through Jamboree into something else. My thoughts:

• In every instance, Sander sought inclusion in his images. SS soldiers were represented equally alongside farmers, bankers, and the homeless. He eschewed visual politicking for a more ethnographic approach, and his preferred medium of photography proved to be ideally suited for this objective documentation. This approach is simply impossible in music, and as such, Jamboree is an extremely subjective piece of work. I don’t think this in any way detracts from the overall strength of the project, but it does place the work as a whole in a slightly different category – it’s a subjective documentation – true crime as music.
• While I was walking through the gallery, I found it hard to avoid a type of temporal rubbernecking. Nearly every subject in every photograph would now be dead. To photograph something is almost to buck fate – to wholly define a moment by removing it from the endless flow of time. Sander recognized this – one of the most powerful images in the series, which unfortunately was not included in this exhibition, is the death mask of his son, Erich Sander (to whom Jamboree is dedicated).
• It’s interesting that a person’s taxonomic value is summed up by Sander as “Banker” or “Communist Party Leader”. Gives some perspective on his views on employment.
• In his own time, Sander was viewed as being pretty conservative, which is something I didn’t realize. He didn’t bother with the technical or compositional innovations of the time, instead preferring conventional compositions produced using unwieldy, antiquated technology. In a time of advances in perspective theory and handheld cameras, Sander’s technique meant that his work wasn’t included in exhibits focusing on ‘modern’ photography. It’s understandable really – with no knowledge of the larger context, his individual images are merely good. They are only truly great when taken as small parts of a much greater whole.

One book closes, another opens.