[Winter 2025]

Sander Sardinia 1927
by Kenneth Hayes

[EXCERPT]

This tightly focused exhibition presents photographs that August Sander made on his little-known journey to Sardinia in the spring of 1927, just prior to the debut of the presentation of his life-work, The People of the 20th Century, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, in Cologne, later that year. The exhibition’s curator, Florent To Lay, has selected forty pictures from a corpus of about three hundred that Sander made during a month-long trip to the island. The journey’s timing on the cusp of Sander’s fame – presumably planned by his friend and travel partner, the author Ludwig Mathar, who had commissioned the work – makes it tempting to regard the work as Sander’s project in nuce. In truth, there is nothing in its content to counter that interpretation; the pictures display Sander’s famously sober, analytical approach and comprise all of his typically exhaustive range of subjects.

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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 129 – FROM CONTINENT TO CONTINENT ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: August Sander]

Kenneth Hayes is a retired architectural historian who lives in Sudbury, Ontario. In 2010, he completed a PhD dissertation titled The Wooden Hypostyle Mosques of Anatolia: Mosque- and State-building under Mongol Suzerainty. He occasionally writes contemporary art criticism, with a particular focus on photography. He is the author of Milk and Melancholy (MIT Press and Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, 2008), a book about images of milk splashes in photo-conceptual art from 1965 to 1985.