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The Art Assignment
What This Photo Doesn't Show
What This Photo Doesn't Show
The Art Assignment
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9:40 · Feb 28, 2019
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Studios the photographer August sander called
0:05
this famous picture young farmers
0:08
1914 sander actually took many pictures of young farmers
0:11
this one is called young farmers
0:13
as is this one for his massive never finished project
0:16
people of the 20th century
0:18
sander sought to photograph all sorts of people in Germany from
0:21
aristocrats to circus performers
0:24
to soldiers while many of these portraits are still widely shared today these
0:28
young farmers are probably
0:30
the the picture is often called three farmers
0:34
on their way to a dance which
0:36
is also the title of a Richard powers novel inspired
0:38
by the photograph but the
0:40
truth of this picture turns
0:42
out to be complicated
0:43
first starters the three farmers weren't
0:46
farmers there's a lot to love about this picture the
0:50
farmers feet are in the mud but their heads are in the sky which
0:54
is not a bad metaphor for being 20 their expressions
0:57
capture the way you feel when you're with your best friends
1:00
in your nicest clothes and speaking
1:02
of the clothes they're part of what makes this picture fascinating
1:06
the art critic John Berger
1:07
wrote the three young men belong
1:09
at the very most to
1:11
the second generation who
1:12
ever wore such suits in the European
1:15
countryside 20 or 30 years earlier such clothes did not exist
1:19
at a price which peasants
1:20
could afford the landscape in the background might
1:23
look as it had a hundred
1:24
or five hundred years
1:25
before but industrialization combined
1:28
with mass media like
1:30
films and magazines meant
1:31
that urban fashion was
1:33
now available and attractive
1:35
to rural people and I love how they're looking over their shoulders
1:39
as if they barely have time to pause for the camera
1:43
before going toward the dance and the rest of their lives but there's also
1:47
tension in the picture
1:49
the farmers dandy like poses
1:51
with cigarettes and John T canes are strangely
1:54
incongruent with the pastoral
1:56
landscape in the background
1:57
also their heads are sort of being cut off by the horizon line
2:02
which turns out to be tragically
2:04
resonant because when the picture was taken of course the
2:08
three farmers were on their way to
2:10
two dances the dance they knew about in a nearby village and
2:14
the dance they didn't know about World
2:17
War one the picture was probably taken shortly before the assassination
2:23
of the Archduke Franz
2:24
Ferdinand and within a few months Germany
2:27
would be at war and the
2:28
same industrialization that made their suits possible
2:32
with mass produced weapons far
2:34
deadlier than any the world had ever
2:36
and these young farmers
2:38
would be on the front lines or
2:40
so we are left to presume it's
2:43
a picture about not knowing
2:45
not knowing what's going to happen to you to
2:48
your friends to the nation Philip
2:50
Roth called history the
2:52
relentless unforeseen he said that history is
2:56
where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled
3:00
on the page as inevitable
3:02
and in the faces of these young farmers
3:04
we glimpse how profoundly
3:06
unexpected the coming horror really
3:09
was and we're reminded that there
3:11
is also a horizon
3:13
that we cannot see past we
3:15
are forced to reckon with the possibility
3:17
that our filtered and playful
3:19
pictures may look different to people in a century history
3:22
is merely a list of surprises
3:25
Kurt Vonnegut wrote it
3:26
can only prepare us to be surprised
3:29
yet again so that's how I always read
3:31
the picture the farmers were symbols
3:33
of a precarious historical
3:35
moment they were reminders
3:37
that I too might
3:38
be surprised by history but
3:40
it turns out of course that
3:42
the boys were not mere symbols
3:43
but were in fact human
3:46
beings this is Otto Krieger
3:48
born in 1894 he actually
3:51
knew the photographer August Anderson durr had photographed
3:54
otto and his family back in 1911 the
3:57
negative of that picture was likely destroyed
4:00
along with 30,000 other saunder
4:02
negatives during world war ii but
4:04
Kriegers family still has this copy of the picture as
4:07
saunder probably knew otto Krieger
4:10
was not a farmer
4:11
he worked in an iron ore mine so
4:14
did the boy in the middle Auguste
4:15
Klein whose family had also been photographed
4:18
by saunder and then we have a vault Klein who
4:21
seems to me anyway the
4:23
most nervous of the bull with his tight lips and ramrod
4:27
straight cane he seems uncomfortable
4:29
in front of the camera
4:30
Evald worked in the iron mines office
4:32
his godson would later say that bevel
4:35
didn't like to get his hands dirty my
4:37
kind of guy and so
4:39
the young farmers were in fact too
4:42
young miners and an office worker which
4:44
is to say that they were participants
4:46
in the industrial economy in
4:48
fact the iron ore
4:50
from the mine where they worked would go toward building weapons in
4:53
the coming war they lived in a village of around a hundred and fifty
4:57
people in the Wester vald mountains in western germany
5:00
fact then the village wasn't accessible
5:02
by car so to visit
5:04
sander drove to the end of the road and then walked his camera equipment
5:08
up the mountain for miles auto
5:10
August and Evald really
5:11
were on their way to a dance which
5:13
was in a little town about a 45-minute
5:15
walk away they probably walked along one of these paths which
5:19
are still there by the way and sander likely knew their route in advance
5:23
so he was probably set
5:25
up when the boys arrived they
5:26
paused in front of the camera turned
5:28
their heads over their shoulders and held
5:31
still it was a long exposure Otto
5:33
hat cocked cigarette in his lips looking
5:37
like the kind of trouble you wouldn't mind getting into August
5:40
handsome and confident a little bit sleepy
5:43
eyed and then there's anxious
5:45
hand tightly gripping his cane I know
5:48
it's silly to make broad conclusions
5:50
about real human beings from a single frame of their lives but
5:55
I can't help myself I
5:56
look at those three boys and
5:58
I see the devil-may-care glean
6:00
in Otto's eyes and
6:02
the cool handsomeness of August and devils
6:05
nerves and then they turned away from the camera and kept
6:08
walking I wonder if they had a good time how
6:11
late they stayed out whether
6:13
they drank who they danced with we know it was a Saturday in
6:17
spring or early summer we
6:19
know they were out of the mine in the light and we
6:23
know that it must have been one of the last dances
6:25
they attended together because
6:27
the other dance was coming fast
6:29
only a few months later all three boys were called to serve in the
6:33
German armed forces in
6:34
World War Otto and
6:36
August were placed in the same regiment and sent to Belgium to fight in
6:40
January of 1915 only
6:43
a few months after the young farmers photo August
6:46
Klein sent home this picture
6:48
from snowy Belgium which
6:50
has never been seen publicly
6:51
before the boys look different now the
6:54
future which had been just over the horizon
6:57
has come into view the
6:59
relentless unforeseen has been seen at last
7:03
but even then Auguste
7:05
and Otto could not know they
7:07
couldn't know that August would be killed in the war that March
7:11
1 of 20 million people to
7:14
die in World War 1 Otto
7:16
would be wounded twice but
7:18
survived the war Evald
7:21
who was assigned to a different regiment
7:23
also seems to have been wounded but
7:25
eventually made it back to his tiny village
7:27
where he lived to old age 3
7:30
mine workers on their
7:32
way to a war
7:34
1914 - will come home injured one
7:38
will not come home at all
7:40
August Klein was 22
7:42
years old when he died
7:44
he was not a metaphor
7:46
or a statistic he
7:48
was however briefly a human
7:51
being photography does a lot of things for us it
7:55
gives us glimpses into
7:56
places far away and times long past it
8:00
can help us to understand
8:01
the world it can make us feel like we've seen things we'll never really
8:05
see or known people will
8:07
never really meet but
8:09
a picture is not a life the
8:12
young farmers photograph is about what those boys don't know but
8:16
it is also about what
8:18
we don't know and a
8:20
reminder of what pictures
8:22
cannot show us this
8:25
video would not have been possible without the reporting
8:27
of Reinhard paps to the support of KT Sanner and the dogged
8:31
sleuthing of to Atari ax an extraordinary
8:34
community of problem solvers thanks also to rosianna halse rojas and Sarah green for
8:39
their help searching for the young farmers
8:41
and thanks as always to the patrons
8:43
of the art assignment including
8:44
Vincent Appa make it all possible thanks
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to sun basket for supporting PBS Digital
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