Identity/Status/Class: August Sander and the Visual Politics of Social Stratification

A lecture by Noam M. Elcott, Columbia University

How do societies categorize its people into groups? How can artists make those categories visible? Today, we tend to speak of identities, and occasionally classes. In the medieval and early modern periods, European societies were ordered by estates. Beginning in the 1920s, August Sander (1876-1964) embarked on an unprecedented (and in many respects unsurpassed) effort to catalogue all the social types of his time through the medium of photography and around the concept of social status (Stand).

In People of the Twentieth Century, the grandiose title for his grandiose project, Sander divided up German society into seven groups, subdivided into some 50 portfolios. Each portfolio (ideally containing 12 photographs) aimed to capture a single type, such as: Young Peasants, Workers, The Elegant Woman, The Student, The National Socialist, The Teacher and Educator, The Actor, The Architect, Traveling People, Gypsies and Transients, Servants, The Persecuted, Political Prisoners, or Foreign Workers. The portfolios were organized into seven larger groups: The Peasant, The Craftsman, The Woman, Social Status Groups, The Artists, The Metropolis, and, finally, Idiots, the Sick, the Insane, Matter.

Nothing about Sander’s “sociology without writing but rather with images” (Döblin) should strike us as self-evident. And yet Sander positioned himself astutely and explosively within ascendant political-economic, sociological, and “racial-scientific” discourses, themselves in dialogue with Marx, Weber, and others, who proffered theories of social stratification, that is, how a society categorizes its people into groups.

This lecture (and the forthcoming book from which it derives) advances social status—in dialogue with class and race—as the organizing principle of Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century as well as a constitutive and overlooked component of modern social stratification. And it argues, ultimately, that Sander’s grand project simultaneously instantiated and exploded the mania for typology that still possesses us.

Bio:
Noam M. Elcott is Associate Professor for the history of modern art at Columbia University and an editor of the journalGrey Room. Elcott is the author of the award-winning book Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2016; paperback 2018), as well as essays on art, film, and media published in leading journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogues. His current book projects are ArtTM: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks and Photography, Identity, Status: August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century.