Ebner / Langfeld – Postures / Haltungen ; People of the Centre Pompidou — After August Sander

Do people today still define themselves by their profession, as August Sander assumed in the 1920s for his project People of the Twentieth Century? Aren’t our identities today much more complex, if not multipolar? After the major August Sander exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in the summer of 2022, it seemed a worthwhile undertaking to apply the categories and filters of the Cologne photographer to the great Parisian institution itself a hundred years later. Not only are there a multitude of professions to be found there but the staff itself is a representative social sample: a miniature society within the larger urban milieu. Andreas Langfeld (photography) and Florian Ebner (concept and text) took up this idea and together conceived an update of Sander’s atlas. The result is a portrait of society that does not attempt to be an illustrative equivalent; rather, the differences and contradictions it reveals create an apt portrait of our 2020s.