Side Gallery – on until 3rd December 2012
“August Sander was one of the great portraitists. His aim was to document the German nation, showing every type from labourer to aristocrat, pugilist to professor. His work in the 1910 to 1930 period resulted in a book "Face of our Time". When Hitler came to power he was unhappy that not all the subjects presented an Aryan ideal and the printing plates were destroyed in 1934. The sixty plates in the book represented only a fraction of his work, which inspired the likes of Diane Arbus. They are straightforward unromanticised depictions, which seem to give one an insight into the character of the subject.
I saw the full exhibition in the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh recently and was blown away by the quality and power of the prints, some are originals. This is a great opportunity to see the work of a seminal photographer....don't miss it.”
John Clarke
Also on at the Side Gallery, an interesting juxtaposition, is work by John Heartfield, a German artist whose politically charged photomontages were banned during the Nazi regime.
Sharply critical of the Weimar Republic, his work was rediscovered in the Democratic Republic in the late 1950s. Since then, his art has influenced generations of artists and graphic designers.
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