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What Germans Looked Like

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The Daily Pic: August Sander cataloged his nation – to show it couldn't be done.

"Young Farmers, 1914" and "Country Girls, 1925", by August Sander

"Young Farmers, 1914" and "Country Girls, 1925", by August Sander (© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, August Sander Archiv, Köln; ARS, NY)

August Sander's photographic "inventory" of the German people in the first half of the last century  is endlessly fascinating – as it proved, yet again, in a selection I saw at Edwynn Houk in New York. As I've written before, what interests me about the project isn't its initial premise, but its obvious impossibility and guaranteed failure – a failure that must have been perfectly evident to Sander, as a sophisticated member of the lefty German art scene. An inventory of a people only reveals that a people cannot be inventoried. The whole thing can be read as a repudiation of the idea of national identity, rather than a sober exploration of it.

For a full visual survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.

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Blake Gopnik is a contributing critic to Newsweek and The Daily Beast and writes on art and design for a wide range of publications. He previously spent a decade as chief art critic of The Washington Post and before that was an arts editor and critic in Canada. He has a doctorate in art history from Oxford University, and has written on aesthetic topics ranging from Facebook to gastronomy.

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