Curator:  Valentín Roma and Gillermo Zuaznabar
Opening: Friday 22th March, 7 pm
Free guided tours: Tuesday at 6 pm; Saturday and Sunday at noon
Guided tours by Valentín Roma: 25 April, 16 May (this one on behalf of Gillermo Zuaznabar), 13 June, 6 pm

Held in collaboration with the August Sander Archiv belonging to Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur in Cologne, Photographs from People of the 20th Century constitutes the most comprehensive exhibition ever staged in Spain on August Sander’s project of the same name.

In addition to the 187 photographs organised following Sander’s own typological concept, a group of motifs of the series “Studies – The Human Being” is included, that has rarely been presented in the international museum’s context until today. These pictures are dedicated to details of some of his models’ gestures, looks and postures and especially to hands.

The exhibition, that shows high quality modern prints on the base of the original gelatin silver negative glass plates, is completed with a documentary section showing handwritten letters from the photographer, the portfolios made at the time for some sections and a variety of bibliographical material.

August Sander (Herdorf, 1876 – Cologne, 1964) occupies an absolutely tutelary position in the history of photography. From Walter Benjamin to Susan Sontag, from Roland Barthes to John Berger, a significant part of the great narrators of images measured their theoretical apparatus before Sander’s unsentimental—and therefore politically incisive—photographs with estimation.

Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts [People of the 20th Century] is his most legendary project, a huge archive of professional and typological portraits that ref lects the productive fabric of German society from the 1910s to the mid 1950s, between the Weimar Republic and the downfall of Nazism after the Second World War.