17 November 1876 – 20 April 1964, was a German portrait and documentary photographer. Born in Herdorf in the Prussian Rhineland, the son of a carpenter working in the mining industry, he first encountered photography while assisting a photographer employed at a local mine. He later acquired his own camera, worked in photographic studios in Germany and Austria, and eventually established a studio in Cologne in 1910.

Sander is best known for his systematic portrait project People of the Twentieth Century (Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts), developed over several decades. Through carefully composed portraits of farmers, workers, professionals, artists, and marginalized individuals, he sought to create a typological cross-section of German society during the early twentieth century, particularly the period of the Weimar Republic.

In 1929 he published the photobook Face of Our Time (Antlitz der Zeit), which presented part of this larger project. Although Sander also photographed landscapes, architecture, and urban scenes, his direct and objective portraits became central to twentieth-century documentary photography and influenced later photographic approaches to typology and social observation.

Reference
Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), English edition. Retrieved March 16, 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Sander