The August Sander Project, 2019

Barry Bergdoll: V/31 The Architect
Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Shapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia, served as chief curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA from 2007 to 2014. A specialist in 19th- and 20th-century French and German architectural history, he has also written a series of essays over the years on the relationship of architecture and photography. Among the exhibitions he curated or co-curated at MoMA are Mies in Berlin (2001), Bauhaus 1919–1933, Workshops for Modernity (2009), and Frank Lloyd Wright at 100, Unpacking the Archive (2017). He is currently preparing for the publication of his 2013 Mellon lectures on the history of exhibiting architecture since 1750.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin: II/8 The Master Craftsman
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are artists living and working between London and Berlin. They are professors of photography at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg and teach in the MA Photography and Society program at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), the Hague, which they codesigned. They recently had solo exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou (2018) and the Hasselblad Center (2017), and their work is held in major public and private collections including Pompidou, Tate, MoMA, Yale University Art Gallery, Stedelijk Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Broomberg and Chanarin received the 2018 Arles Photo Text Award for War Primer 2, and they are the recipients of the ICP Infinity Award (2014) for Holy Bible, and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2013) for War Primer 2.

Geoff Dyer: V/29 The Writer
Geoff Dyer’s many books include But Beautiful, The Ongoing Moment, and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). A recipient of a 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for nonfiction, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books have been translated into 24 languages. His latest books are The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand and Broadsword Calling Danny Boy. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he is Writer-in-Residence at USC.

Florian Ebner: VI/41 Servants
Florian Ebner is Chief of Photography at Centre Pompidou in Paris. Ebner is currently conceiving Calais – testimonies from the Jungle, a comparative approach to the imagery of migration, mixing up the discourses of journalism, long-term documentary projects, and amateur photography. He recently organized, with Damarice Amao and Christian Joschke, Photographie, arme de class, charting the less well-known roots of social documentary practice in French photo history. Previously, Ebner worked at Museum Folkwang, and he served as director of Braunschweig Photography Museum from 2009 to 2012. He also curated the 2015 Venice Biennale’s German Pavilion.

Lucy Gallun: III/14 Woman and Child
Lucy Gallun is an associate curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA. She has curated or co-curated multiple exhibitions at MoMA, including Being: New Photography 2018, Projects 108: Gauri Gill at MoMA PS1, Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection, and Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War; and she was co-editor of Photography at MoMA, a three-volume history of photography at the Museum. Recent essays appear in forthcoming books on Roland Barthes and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and she is currently at work on the next New Photography exhibition, among others.

Lydia Goehr: V/34 The Composer
Lydia Goehr is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University. She is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music; The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy; and Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory, and is co-editor, with Daniel Herwitz, of The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera. Her current book is titled Red Sea—Red Square: Picturing Freedom—Liberating Wit. She is co-editor, with Jonathan Gilmore, of Handbook on Arthur C. Danto, contracted with Wiley-Blackwell.

Sabine Hake: V/30 The Actor
Sabine Hake is Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture in the Department of Germanic Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. A cultural historian working on 19th- and 20th-century Germany, she is the author of seven monographs, including Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin (2008). Her most recent book, The Proletarian Dream: Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany 1863–1933 (2017) won the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures. She is currently working on the second volume, titled The Workers’ States: On the Legacies of Socialism, 1933–1989.

Andreas Killen: IV/21 The Doctor and the Pharmacist
Andreas Killen teaches modern European history and the history of the human sciences at City College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published widely on German history, the history of psychiatry, and film history. His most recent book is Homo Cinematicus: Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany (2017). He is currently working on a project titled A Cultural History of the Brain in the 1950s.

George E. Lewis: V/35 The Performing Musician
George E. Lewis is Professor of American Music at Columbia University. Lewis is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author of A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press) and co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. Lewis’s compositions have been performed by ensembles worldwide, and he holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida, and Harvard University.

Megan Luke: V/32 The Sculptor
Megan Luke is an associate professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Southern California. Her first book, Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile (2014), received the 2015 Robert Motherwell Book Award, and she co-edited, with Sarah Hamill, Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction (2017). With a Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, she is writing her next book, The Sculptural Surrogate: Reproduction and the Object of History, which considers how the development of reproductive technologies remade the sculptural object and modern sculpture theory.

Moderators
Brigid Doherty teaches in the departments of German and Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, where her research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of 20th-century art and literature, with special emphasis on the history of German modernism and on relationships among the visual arts, literature, and aesthetic and psychoanalytic theories. She has published widely on German Dada, avant-garde art and art theory of the 1920s, and contemporary art. She is co-editor of a volume of writings by Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibilty and Other Writings on Media (2008).

Robin Kelsey is dean of Arts and Humanities and Burden Professor of Photography in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard. He holds a PhD from Harvard and a JD from Yale Law School. Kelsey is the author of many articles and essays on the history of photography, as well as of the books Photography and the Art of Chance (2015) and Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850–1890 (2007). He has received various awards for his scholarship and teaching, including the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize.

Co-Directors:
Noam M. Elcott (Columbia University) and
Sarah H. Meister (The Museum of Modern Art)

Photographs

August Sander (German, 1876–1964) created the most ambitious and influential portrait of the people of the 20th century. This encyclopedic photographic project—anchored in the farmers of the Westerwald but extending to the furthest reaches of professional, bohemian, and polite society—was never completed. And its most comprehensive form—over 600 photographs divided into seven volumes and nearly 50 portfolios—has never been exhibited in North America. In 2015 MoMA acquired all 619 photographs that comprise People of the Twentieth Century.

Project

We plan to gather leading art historians, curators, artists, and other scholars and writers once a year for five years. At each daylong meeting, 9–10 participants will each present a single portfolio according to her or his expertise and insight. Over the course of five years, we will return to Sander’s seven basic groupings (The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, The Woman, Classes and Professionals, The Artists, The City, The Last People) from multiple perspectives: historical and curatorial, artistic and poetic, philosophical and conceptual.

Format

Each annual, daylong gathering combines 9–10 focused presentations of individual portfolios. An intimate group of approximately 50 scholars, curators, and artists will meet at The Museum of Modern Art, surrounded by the portfolios selected by each year’s presenters. Talks and discussions will be recorded and transcribed, and we are exploring ways of sharing this information with a broader audience.

Themes

No theme is off limits. Among the numerous topics summoned by Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century are portraiture; the Weimar republic; gender, class, and other social structures; photo-books and archives; documents and documentary; physiognomy (the art and “science” of reading faces); humanism and anti-humanism; Sander’s post-WWII aesthetic legacy; and the multifarious contemporary efforts—honorific and repressive—to compile and organize photographs of faces.

The August Sander Project is made possible through the generous support of David Dechman, Richard Rieger, and Artur Walther. This year we are extremely grateful for additional support from across Columbia University: Division of Humanities within the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Departments of Art History and Archaeology, Music, and Philosophy, and the Edwin H. Case Chair in American Music.