You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search. The sequencing of these components loosely positioned each portrait as a fleshy stopping point on a rural road trip into the more tradition-bound corners of Germany. Public domain. In fact, given the relatively low profile of her text and the utter dominance of the portraits, Das deutsche Volksgesicht almost qualified as a book-length photo-essay.
Later in the nineteenth century, new printing technologies such as the halftone enabled photography to cover the pages of mass media formats such as newspapers and magazines and, in the process, reverse the priority of text to image.
This advent also made the sequencing of photos possible, allowing magazines in particular to convey themes using pictures and, in the process, leave text a mere afterthought. But it was only in late that the first book-length photo-essays began to appear.
These largely featured a short introduction followed by an uninterrupted sequence of captioned photos. Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum. The images in sequence offered both spectacle and pedagogy. Sander had been producing a large archive of negatives that he intended for an equally massive but ultimately unrealized book project on German society titled Menschen des Jahrhunderts Citizens of the Twentieth Century.
Antlitz der Zeit served as an interim report on a multi-volume publication that was to follow. Here Sander was classifying his subjects by social and professional categories, and then placing them across an arc that rose and fell in stature as one navigated the book from its beginning to end. It would also help the reader find a place in that society.
