August Sander

Sander's People of the 20th Century set out to portray every type in German society, from farmers and bricklayers to bankers, artists and the unemployed, each posed frontally, full-length or half-length, in their own clothes and setting, looking straight back at the camera. The plain, even light and the sitter's own pose do the characterising. The Nazis seized and destroyed the printing plates of his 1929 book Face of Our Time, and his son Erich, a political prisoner who died in custody, had helped in the studio. His son Gunther later printed and published the archive.