August Sander conceived People of the 20th Century in the 1920s as an encompassing portrait of the society around him. He continued working on the project throughout his life without completing it. Rather than treating portraiture as a succession of isolated likenesses, Sander sought a broader social picture: hundreds of sitters were classified through professional, familial, and social affiliations, allowing individual presence and collective structure to occupy the same photographic field.

The project’s architecture is fundamental to its meaning. Sander envisioned seven groups—The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, The Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People, the final category addressing age, illness, and death. These divisions turn sequence and comparison into analytical tools. Clothing, posture, occupation, and setting register social position, while each sitter remains more complicated than the category assigned. The tension between type and person gives the work its enduring intellectual force.

Published by Schirmer/Mosel in 2013, this substantial single-volume edition draws together a core selection from the seven-volume edition issued in 2002. Its scale—more than 800 pages—allows the work to be encountered not as a handful of canonical portraits but as an extended, interconnected system. The cumulative arrangement is crucial: meanings arise across groups, through repetition, contrast, and the gradual expansion of Sander’s social taxonomy.

For a serious photobook collection, the volume merits attention because it preserves the project’s defining relationship between image and classification in a concentrated form. It is at once a sustained study of portraiture and an ambitious attempt to organize a society through photographs. The book also leaves its own method open to scrutiny, inviting readers to consider what such categories reveal, what they simplify, and how individual subjects resist the structures intended to describe them.