[Double Exposure Portrait of Hans Walter Reitz]

For August Sander, the human face could be a map. In People of the 20th Century, his career-spanning survey of German society, the photographer locates the nation in the faces of his subjects. This is a subtle terrain: regional and civic distinctions pronounce themselves in the curl of a lip or the cut of a collar—an entire class system is tied up in a cravat. But this unusual portrait breaks new ground. It is an experimental outtake from the larger project, in which Sander swaps sly mapping for outright axonometry.


Atop a portrait of the architect Hans Walter Reitz, Sander has overlaid a second image of a building. In this double exposure, the structure’s crisp geometry sharpens the contours of the man’s face, nosing into high relief. It is one of Reitz’s designs: a modern apartment block erected not far from Sander’s own studio in Cologne. The two men would have crossed paths among the city’s avant-garde—a loose federation of artists then working to adapt abstract motifs and constructivist design toward socially progressive ends. Many members of this circle sat for Sander. He aimed to classify his subjects according to professional or social type, and within this system, artists, too, performed their appointed roles.


The Reitz portrait departs from Sander’s fastidious language of formal economy. Printed on postcard stock and never published, it is an exception in his body of work, although not one without precedent. Around 1925, the Cologne painter Marta Hegemann posed for him with an original composition painted directly onto her face, suggesting a mode of creation inextricable from the corporeal self. For Reitz’s photograph, Sander relocates that synthesis from the studio to the darkroom. The result is a cerebral twist on the occupational portrait; montaging the architect’s face together with his facade, Sander seems to render an idea taking shape.