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THOMAS ZELLER ON AUGUST SANDER'S RHINE LANDSCAPES

THE GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHER August Sander (1876–1964) took this picture of the Rhine River, close to Bonn, in 1930.1Sander revealed a Rhine bristling with human activity, and his photograph is an aesthetically powerful reminder of the idea of cultural landscape, which has been far more politically complicated in Europe than in the United States. In fact, the politics of the idea have hampered European environmental historians' ability to discuss human landscapes. Sander's work suggests ways in which historians can now embrace the European tradition of cultural landscape, and move beyond the twentieth-century politics which tainted that tradition for so long. Given the preeminence of cultural landscapes in American documentary photography, these politics of the aesthetics mattered, and still matter, on both sides of the Atlantic.	1
Neither a wild river nor a Romantic conduit for river cruises, August Sander's Rhine is a working Rhine.2 The manifold human activities on and alongside the Rhine are his central narrative.3 Wing dams built into the stream on the left hand side calm its waters, slow its flow, and help to create a navigation channel, used by the Rhine barge in the lower right of the picture. The Nonnenwerth Island is in the midst of the river. It is the site of a Franciscan monastery that, in the nineteenth century, became a hotel whose guests included the American writer James Fenimore Cooper and the European composer Franz Liszt.4 Beyond the river's banks, humans have created fertile agricultural landscapes with sharply delineated fields, meadows, and pockets of trees. The Eifel Mountains dominate the background. Small and medium-sized clouds add to the sense of movement and activity that Sander's Rhine encapsulates.	2
August Sander: The Rhine Valley and the Nonnenwerth Island, 1930. © Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Cologne; Artists Rights Society, New York, 2007.
Sander is well known for his series of human portraits, published in 2002 as People of the Twentieth Century. In that work, he captured a totality of German faces, people from different classes, regions, and origins. Sander was interested in reading the physiognomy of the men and women he portrayed, looking for discernible differences that would reveal the conditions in which they lived.5 Sander chose a similar approach to landscape photography, which he pursued from the start of his career. This photograph is thus a portrait of a Rhine, its countenance analyzed as Sander would read a human face, its varied surface as revealing as a human expression.	. . .