Florian Ebner

Do people today still define themselves by their profession, as August Sander assumed in the 1920s for his project People of the Twentieth Century? After the major August Sander exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in the summer of 2022, it seemed a worthwhile undertaking to apply the categories and filters of the Cologne photographer to the great Parisian institution itself 100 years later. Not only are there a multitude of professions to be found among the visitors, but the staff itself is a representative social sample: a miniature society within the larger urban milieu. Editor Florian Ebner (born 1970) and photographer Andreas Langfeld (born 1984) applied Sander’s methodology to create an update of his original atlas. The result is a view of society that does not attempt to be an illustrative equivalent; rather, the differences and contradictions it reveals create an apt portrait of the 2020s.

In 2022, the Centre Pompidou presented an exhibition on People of the Twentieth Century, the magnum opus of German photographer August Sander (1876–1964). The museum refreshed the project by placing it in dialogue with the work of his contemporaries.
Typomania and the Cross-Sectional View picks up where the Pompidou exhibition left off, offering the latest research on Sander’s decades-long endeavor to visually record his native country’s populace. The text-focused volume reiterates that the photographer was not alone in his obsessive examination of German society and its typologies. Portraits by Otto Dix, silhouette prints by Gerd Arntz and silent movie film stills are emblematic of an era in which the representative social samples identified by Sanders permeated art as well as popular culture. Buoyed by an extensive bibliography, Typomania and the Cross-Sectional View is a true August Sander visual reader for the 21st century.