Documenta
Portraits of history, Mexican and German
It is a somewhat gratifying irony that the photographs depicting the “types” that Sander most honored -- laborers, professionals and creative artists -- are the least interesting of the lot. These images feature mostly white men, often bedecked with the tools of their trade, calmly posing in impersonal studio settings. Far more compelling are those subjects that Sander seems to have not known what to do with: circus performers, blind children, carnival revelers, working women, beggars, and the more rebellious or effeminate of the artists. These people, perhaps unfamiliar with or uninterested in the intricacies of Sander’s social vision and usually not pinned against his white studio wall, bring a wonderful degree of honesty to the photographs. They confront the viewer with evidence of the culture‘s marginalia -- its sensuality, its illness, its forgotten citizens, allowed briefly, in this unique period of cultural and political self-interrogation, to step out of the shadows. A multiracial group of circus performers posing outside a trailer have thick, knowing bodies, and faces as rich and bruised as plowed earth. A pair of blind girls -- one with a distant, vacant gaze, the other pointing her empty eyes proudly at the camera -- stand with their arms tangled possessively, communicating in a language of touch we can only wonder at. A woman in drag stands in a wood-paneled room, lighting a cigarette with a swaggering “new woman” air. With her hair slicked back, her handsome Nordic features are defiantly androgynous, and her gaze is brazenly languorous, sultry and reckless.
Photographic portraits are elusive things, as alluringly intimate as they are ultimately impenetrable. In the case of these two exhibitions, where the portraits are fragments of history as well as personal images, documents as well as art, they transcribe the richness of their times with remarkable immediacy. Each image seems to contain, in Sontag’s words, an actual piece of the history, in all its hope and desperation.
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