Three faces of the shutter impulse

Every archive is, inevitably, also an editorial. Sander's reflects his belief that civilizations followed patterns of development, sophistication and decay, a notion popularized in Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West" (1918). He organized his photographic material according to such a progression, moving from farmer to banker to blind man and beggar, from archetypes of earthbound solidity to the dregs of urban industrialization. Much is omitted along the way (he gave notoriously short shrift to the Weimar Republic's liberated, newly enfranchised woman), but Sander took in the gritty evidence of Germany's economic distress as avidly as its cultural florescence.

He posed his subjects to deliver maximum information by economical means, without flourishes. Every subject is in sharp focus, and nearly all stare directly at the camera in honest declarations of the self.

An image of a girl inside a carnival wagon, reaching her arm through a window to place the key in the lock of the door that confines her, is an entire parable in a single frame. Many of the pictures could yield whole novels. At least one actually did: "Young Farmers," an iconic triple portrait, inspired Richard Powers' fascinating 1985 "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance," in which the young men are described as having "dropped their obstinate masks of individuality and taken up the more serious work of the tribe."

Every Sander subject oscillates between those obligations to represent the unique self and the generalized type. Sander's ambition and the medium's unnerving defiance of temporal laws enable us to lock eyes with these diverse souls. The effect is staggering, sobering, heartening.

Theme and variation are also in dynamic interplay in an adjacent show in the Getty's galleries: "Bernd and Hilla Becher: Basic Forms." Both shows were curated by the Getty's Virginia Heckert, who worked with Judy Annear of Australia's Art Gallery of New South Wales on the Sander.

The Bechers, German photographers who married in 1961 and worked collaboratively until Bernd's death last year, built a portrait archive of their own, only not with human subjects. They photographed industrial structures such as blast furnaces, water towers and silos, each from a uniform distance in flat, neutralizing light.