August Sander. Persecuted / Persecutors. People of the 20th Century

Toward the end of World War I, while working from his studio in Cologne, Sander began what would become his life's work: a photographic portrait of German society under the Weimar Republic. He called this endeavor People of the 20th Century. While his first publication was banned from sale in 1936 by the Nazi government, around 1938 Sander began taking identity photographs for persecuted Jews. During World War II he photographed migrant workers; Sander included these images, alongside some taken by his son Erich from the prison where he would die in 1944, plus portraits of National Socialists made before and during the war, in People of the 20th Century.

Sander was unable to publish his monumental work during his lifetime, and these photographs are published together for the first time here, along with contact prints, letters and details about the lives of those photographed.

They are portraits of dignified men and women, victims of an ideology taking their rightful place as "People of the 20th Century" in defiance of Nazi efforts to ostracize them.