These photographs, with their combination of stark objectivity and sympathy for the human condition, stand out as high points of photographic portraiture. They exerted a profound influence on later generations of photographers, among them Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, and Bernd & Hilla Becher, and collectively proposed the idea of the archive as a mode of artistic enquiry.

August Sander was one of the most significant portrait photographers working in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. In the early 1920s, he moved away from the atmospheric, pictorialist style that characterised his earlier work in favour of an objective approach to his subjects. In 1924, Sander began Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts [People of the Twentieth Century], an 'ambitious long-term project' to compile a comprehensive, inclusive visual record of the German people. Antlitz der Zeit [Face of Our Time] is the first published version of this series and the only version supervised by Sander in his lifetime. His inclusion of German citizens of various faiths, such as well as the unemployed, the disabled and other marginalised elements of German society, incurred the disapproval of the National Socialist party, and in 1936 the Nazis confiscated and destroyed unsold copies of Antlitz der Zeit and all of the printing plates.

First edition; 4to (286 x 214 mm, 11¼ x 8½ in); black-and-white photographs printed in relief halftone, minor toning to edges; plain endpapers, yellow cloth-covered flexible boards, spine and front stamped in dark grey, bottom edge a little dust-soiled, printed dust-jacket, lightly soiled, several small chips to edges and spine, splits to flap-folds, spotting to lower panel, a near-fine copy in a very good dust-jacket; 17, [1], [122]pp.

The Book of 101 Books pp52-3; The Photobook: A History I, p124; The Open Book pp84-5; Auer Collection p139; Autopsie I, pp302-9.