In 1927, 51-year-old artist August Sander selected 60 prints from his ongoing photographic series "Man of the 20th Century" for a debut exhibition at a museum in Cologne, Germany, the ancient city where he had lived for nearly two decades, and where he would remain until his death in 1964.

Since the end of World War I, Sander had turned his camera toward the creation of a monumental photographic survey of the German citizenry, selected from all classes, professions, trades and political groups--an astonishing "atlas of types," as the historian Beaumont Newhall was to describe them, and which the artist had planned eventually to publish in 20 volumes. The German people were photographed with a uniform straightforwardness--whether parliamentarian or painter, Gypsy or dwarf, postman or taxi driver--often utilizing a wide aperture that made the sitter appear crisp and the background a hazy blur.

Now, curator Weston Naef has made another selection of 60 Sander prints, this time for a debut exhibition drawn from the J. Paul Getty Museum's extraordinary collection of 1,276 photographs by the artist--the largest Sander holdings outside Germany. "August Sander: Faces of the German People" makes for a richly absorbing show, while also deftly complementing two other notable exhibitions in Southern California.

One is the much-celebrated "Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany," recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, wherein was chronicled the same political persecution of artistic expression that in 1934 brought a sudden halt to Sander's ambitious project. Sander had published only one of his planned volumes when the Nazis confiscated and destroyed all the unsold books, the printing plates and some 40,000 negatives. They recognized--correctly--the threat to Nazi ideology posed by Sander's brilliantly developed aesthetic.

Not only didn't his portraits rapturously idealize their subjects, neither did they merely describe the "types" of people that took their turn posing before the lens. Instead, his photographs democratized. As much as it privileged politicians, police officers and good bourgeois citizens, Sander's camera privileged derelicts, carnival performers and the physically different. All humanity was rendered equal and specific before the eye of the photographer--a position simply intolerable to the maintenance and expansion of fascist authority.