For the first time in Europe, August Sander's (1876-1964) major work "People of the 20^th Century," 619 photographs taken between 1892 and 1954, will be on show in its entirety at the Paris Photo art fair. The work, divided into seven chapters and 46 portfolios, was intended as a cross-section of German society at the most troubled time in its history – between the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi horror.

The prints on show were made in the 1990s by Gerd Sander, the photographer's grandson, and will be on offer as a set at the Galerie Julian Sander stand, the great-grandson, for several million euros. You can also discover them via an app, Collekton.

From this wildly ambitious oeuvre, a few icons are best known, including a trio of young peasants in their Sunday best on their way to the ball. Here is a chance to discover some less famous images, and above all to take the measure, or rather the excessiveness, of this encyclopedic project on which Sander worked all his life, and which he never finished.

'Like a mosaic'

The German, who started out as a travelling photographer, could have settled for being a talented portraitist, immortalizing artists, peasants or notables in their homes, on the street or in his studio. But, after engaging with the artists of the Cologne Progressive Group in the 1920s, he collected his portraits and turned them into a pioneering conceptual work.

His ambition? To draw up a typology of German society in seven major chapters: the peasant, the professional, the woman, the notables, the artists, the big city, the disenfranchised. Each image, presented in this way, ceases to be a portrait of an individual and takes on the character of an archetype, distinguished by an article of clothing, an attitude or a hairstyle: pastry chef, nun, schoolteacher, soldier. "I can't show [my work] in a one single photo, or even in two or three," said Sander in 1951. "Photography is like a mosaic, which only becomes a synthesis when presented en masse."

In this undertaking, Sander seems to have set one foot in the past, and the other in the future. While he focused on the peasants, who for him were the heart of German society, and presented the women as wives, he also captured the modernity of the Weimar Republic and the desire for emancipation of his contemporaries: a secretary with a boyish haircut, a female politician.

'The People Who Knocked on My Door'

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