Consider two pictures. In the large and absorbing new exhibition of photographs by German artist August Sander (1876-1964) at the J. Paul Getty Museum, two pictures tell an almost unbelievable story. Both show women.
The first is a photograph of a farmer's elderly widow, taken in 1912 in the small town of Ottershagen near Cologne. Sander had opened a portrait studio in that city two years before, and he regularly traveled the surrounding region of the Westerwald in search of new clients.
The old woman, seated ramrod-straight before a dark and impenetrable backdrop, holds her hands in her lap and a small book in her hands. (Given her pious demeanor, perhaps it's a Bible or a prayer book.) A faint smile rests on her lips, but it's toughened with age.
She's neatly if simply dressed, wearing coarse, heavy garments and a fringed shawl tied in massive folds around her head. Her sturdy chair is a rustic throne. Lighted from the side, the old woman emerges from the blackness like the passive apparition of a timeless mountain emerging from fog.
The second picture is a portrait of the wife of Cologne painter Peter Abelen, made in 1926. The young woman stands inside an urban apartment, where paintings adorn the walls. Her left leg is bent and her right hip is thrust forward, creating a stylish modern riff on a classical contrapposto pose. Her hair is slicked close to her head, and she's dressed in white harem pants and a man's white shirt and necktie. The air of androgyny demands a double take.
Her frozen grin is interrupted by a cigarette, held between clenched teeth. In a manner at once playful and aggressive, she's performing for the camera's lens. With her white clothing set in sharp contrast to the dark background, the willowy figure is like a flame flickering in an unseen breeze.
Just 14 years separate these two photographs. The worlds they depict, on the other hand, span light-years.
The old woman represents Germany's stolid rural past. She's an Ur-Mother for the Fatherland.
The young one embodies the New Woman, heralded in the tumultuous period's press. She's the unconventional, independent, self-invented, quintessentially modern figure, who was emerging from the Weimar years.
