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How are society’s members and groups identified and organized? Hierarchized and controlled? Favored and suppressed? Potent questions today, they burned with unrivaled intensity in Germany in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. No one provided more compelling visual evidence of the complex social differentiation and stratification of imperial, Weimar, and Nazi Germany than the photographer August Sander—above all, in the 600 photographs, 50 portfolios, and 7 groups comprising his lifework, People of the 20th Century.In a richly illustrated lecture, Noam M. Elcott, Associate Professor of Modern Art and Media at Columbia University and a fellow in the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, unravels the mysterious structure of Sander’s project. The lecture focuses on the photographer’s construction of social types (young peasants, office workers, bourgeois mothers, painters, and servants, among many others), in addition to his engagements with marginalized groups—racial and ethnic minorities, foreigners, the disabled, the unemployed, and others deemed “asocial” in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. Sander’s lifework pursued social types with more rigor than any artist in the 20th century and, simultaneously, warned against that very pursuit—that is, against definitions of “insiders” versus “outsiders.”
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Event Venue
Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St,New Haven, Connecticut, United States
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