August Sander, The Twentieth-Century Man /
Jules Aarons, Views from the Street

August Sander - Few people have seen their world convulsed around them more than August Sander.  Luckily for us, he grabbed his camera and recorded the radical social, political, artistic and economic turmoil that churned around him.  Born in 1876 in Germany, the son of a mining carpenter, he witnessed crowned heads fall, throwing their empires into confusion (Austria-Hungary, Russia).  He saw the rapid industrialization of Europe that sent rural people into the cities and fractured centuries-old social norms.  He lived while national boundaries were chopped up after World War I.  He was caught in the middle of both World Wars, and he lost a son to Hitler’s political machine.

Amid this storm, Sander clung to photography.  Unlike earlier photographers who made sentimental photos that mimicked paintings, Sander embraced a 1920s art movement, called “The New Objectivity,” that called for the need to document the new twentieth century with scientific precision.

Jules Aarons - The scientific world knows Jules Aarons as a pioneer in space physics and global positioning technology.  He even helped establish Boston University’s Center for Space Physics.  But the art world knows Jules Aarons as a noted photographer whose works are in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

One of the finest photographers of the urban scene, he started taking his camera to the streets while an undergraduate at the City College of New York.  “My basic approach to street portraits was to avoid intruding on the scene,” he once said.  During the years he was working at Boston University, he took his double-lens Rolleiflex to Boston’s old West End on weekends and after work.  He was inspired by the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Lisette Model.