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| August Sander Brothers 1920 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Nun 1921 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Gewandhaus Quartet 1921 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Proletarian Intellectuals ca. 1925 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Middle Class Child ca. 1925 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
Completion
Yesterday today was tomorrow.
The goat, bought
to furnish milk
for white eskimo puppies,
cavorted, cutting jerky
angularities of goat-gesture
oblique to spring-cold daylight.
Some days later,
after illness,
she was wild wonder-eyed,
but less prankful and horn-tossing.
Even more days later she was dead,
so that no evidence
of crag-leaping dance-capacities
remained.
She was not then
amusing to look at.
She was skin and bones,
without caprice or whimsicality.
She was not anywhere –
Goats never become angels.
Tomorrow today will be yesterday.
– Robert McAlmon (1925)
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| August Sander Photographer (August Sander) 1925 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Beggar 1926 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Blacksmiths 1926 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Circus Workers ca. 1926-32 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Painter (Heinrich Hoerle) 1928 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
May 20, 1928
Now he is invulnerable like the gods.
Nothing on earth can hurt him, not the coldness of a
woman, nor tuberculosis, nor the troubles of verse,
nor that white thing the moon, which he is no
longer obliged to capture in words.
He strolls beneath the lindens; he looks at balustrades
and doorways, but not to remember them.
Now he knows how many nights and how many
mornings he has left.
His will has imposed on him a precise discipline. He
will perform specific acts, he will cross foreseen
streetcorners, he will touch a tree or a grille, that
the future might be as irrevocable as the past.
He behaves in that way so that the event which he
desires and which he fears may be nothing else than
the conclusive end of a series.
He walks down 49th Street; it strikes him that he will
never go through this or that side door.
Without their suspecting it, he has taken leave now of
many friends.
He thinks of what he will never know, whether the
next day will be rainy.
He meets an acquaintance and cracks a joke. He
knows that this incident will be, on some occasion,
an anecdote.
Now he is invulnerable like the dead.
At a set time, he will climb some marble stairs. (This
will survive in the memories of others.)
He will go down to the men's room; on the checkered
floor the water will soon wash away the blood. The
mirror is waiting for him.
He will slick back his hair, he will adjust the knot of
his tie (he was always a bit of a dandy, as befits a
young poet), and he will try to imagine that the
other man, the one in the glass, is doing these
things and that he, the double, is repeating them.
His hand will not tremble when the end comes.
Passively, magically, the pistol will by now have
rested against the temple.
That, I believe, is how it happened.
– Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Robert Mezey
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| August Sander Disabled Ex-Serviceman ca. 1928 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Young Woman 1929 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Boxers 1929 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| August Sander Farm Hands 1929 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
Poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)