August Sander

In this photograph, August Sander shows a group of circus performers at rest behind the caravan rather than in a dramatic moment of performance under the big top, emphasizing the everyday reality of circus artists’ transient, unconventional lives. Featuring performers of different races and a woman in Orientalist costume, Sander’s image reinforces the exotic qualities of the circus. During the Weimar era, Sander produced nearly 600 portrait photographs of Germans for a project that he called People of the 20th Century.

August Sander had been a portrait photographer for more than twenty years when, in the mid 1920s, he re-examined his archive and started to develop the monumental project People of the Twentieth Century, which was intended to record all social classes and occupational types throughout German society.

Circus Artistes was to be part of the project’s portfolio devoted to big city life, a place of decadence and degeneration, but also of entertainment. The circus people represented a romantic escape from the constraints of society; yet Sander chose as his subject not a dramatic performance in the Big Top, but an everyday scene among the caravans, where the performers were eating and listening to a gramophone. In Sander’s plan for People of the Twentieth Century, each man or woman represented a specific social type, expressed through his or her clothing, body, and posture. Nevertheless, the ushers and performers gaze out directly at the viewer, challenging the anonymity of Sander’s project.