August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer. His first book Face of our Time (Antlitz der Zeit) was published in 1929. Sander has been described as “the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century”. His work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series People of the 20th Century.

August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer. His first book Face of our Time (Antlitz der Zeit) was published in 1929. Sander has been described as “the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century”. His work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series People of the 20th Century.

The two photographic series featured in the book, Guys and Blue Flowers, explore the idea of seductive, fragile beauty removed and yet built from hard labour and standardised systems or practices (Yates Norton). This exploration intertwines the technological possibilities and errors of photography, the relationship between bodies and matter, the search for beauty and the subsequent frustration, and, ultimately, desire and the logic that quenches it.

Edited by Elena Narbutaitė. Designed by Monika Janulevičiūtė.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Peter Hujar, Eyes Open in the Dark at the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, 27 February–23 August 2026.

Peter Hujar was a central figure in the downtown scene of 1970s and early 80s New York, but at his death in 1987 from AIDS-related pneumonia his photography was largely unknown to a broader art world. Hujar’s principal concern was with portraiture, whether photographing his friends and denizens of the downtown scene – whom he encountered on the street, shot in his apartment studio, and sought out at performance venues – or turning his attention to animals, architecture and landscapes.

Portrait Mode presents a new essay by artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey. In aphoristic texts paired with her own photographs, Davey interweaves accounts of her experiences as a photographer with reflections on canonical practitioners and theorists of the medium. With a particular focus on framing, light, contingency, and temporality, she considers the work of photographers who have challenged conventions of (self-)portraiture and representation, connecting their approaches to contemporary queer and feminist protagonists of the genre.

Paul Outerbridge, Jr. emerged in the 1920s as a bold innovator, transforming ordinary objects, such as milk bottles, collars, eggs, into fractured Cubist constructions of light and form. His platinum and silver gelatin prints reduced subjects to intersecting planes and geometric rhythms, revealing a structural beauty aligned with the avant-garde movements of his time.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.