Audio: Curator Weston Naef discusses this image and Sander's project to document the German people.

August Sander began his career in photography running a portrait studio. In his quest for archetypes of the German people, he drafted a scheme dividing his portraits into seven broad categories—farmers, workers, women, men, artists, urban dwellers, and those outside the mainstream of German society—and almost 50 subthemes. Titled People of the Twentieth Century, this ambitious project, which was life-defining for Sander, took portraiture to a new, universal level of expression.

In the 1930s Sander added two portfolios—the Nazi and the Jew—to the original list of categories. Sympathetic to the Jewish people, Sander and his wife shopped at the stores of Jewish merchants, despite Nazi restrictions. Many Jews who attempted to leave Germany had their passport pictures taken at Sander's studio.

These two young women, apparently sisters, fell into Sander's first group of people, farmers. Posed against the background of trees and bushes that Sander favored for his roadside portraits, the sisters are clothed in identical dresses.

View a brief biography and other works by this artist in the Getty online collections.

In Focus: August Sander